


The World Is a Hostile Country

by seventymilestobabylon



Series: The World Is a Hostile Country [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: A Fic without Forks, Alfred Hamilton’s A+ Lord Proprieting, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Miranda Lives, Angst, Background Women of Color Toppling Empires, Canon-Typical Violence, Colonialism, Established Relationship, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Food Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Involuntary Institutionalization, M/M, Multi, Physical Abuse, Polyamory, Queerplatonic Miranda/Thomas, Queerplatonic Relationships, Relationship Negotiation, Suicidal Thoughts, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:08:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 32,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27457009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventymilestobabylon/pseuds/seventymilestobabylon
Summary: "If he had brought her to Charles Town, then she would not have let James agree to shame himself this way, and none of this would be happening. All he needed to have done was trust her."Flint left Miranda behind when he went to Charleston. There, he agreed to Peter Ashe’s plan for securing Nassau’s future, and he and Miranda are now on their way back to London with Peter to put it into motion. Left without much to do, Miranda starts finding out things about their past.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow & Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Series: The World Is a Hostile Country [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2187783
Comments: 31
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am very sorry to people who read this when it was a single-chapter thing -- one of my beta readers thought it would be better if this fic were not so horrifyingly long so now it is a series. I apologize for everything.
> 
> Detailed content warnings are in the notes.

When James came back from Charles Town, he was grim-eyed with his proposed alliance, whereby he might purchase a civilized Nassau with a story of his own shame, paid to authorities in England who had to be taught not to fear him.

They had hammered out a treaty long ago, that he would always come home to her if he was able, and she would not interfere with the things he had to do as Flint. Some devilish and detached part of Miranda found it funny that he had let her interfere this once, only far enough to get him to Charles Town so that he might strike a bargain with Lord Peter Ashe that she would never, never, never have sanctioned.

“You should have let me come with you,” she said, the evening before they were to sail. She had her back to James while he washed. Though the night was not cold, she held up her hands to the fire to warm them.

The sound of splashing water behind her paused for a moment, then resumed. She was the one who had demanded absolution from the choices he made on the account—she could not bear the weight of responsibility for his life—but she bitterly resented the bargain now. If he wanted to immolate himself on the pyre of Thomas’s dreams, then he would do it with or without her cooperation. But she could not bear being made to watch him burn.

Movement flickered in her periphery, and James dropped something small and light into her lap. She picked it up and held it to the light: A gold-plated ring, simple. The kind of ring a sailor could afford. She turned, but James was occupying himself with putting on his night things and would not meet her eyes.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

James jerked his chin at the ring. “I’ve repented,” he said, “of my sins against God and man, since leaving London all those years ago. My marriage to you will be proof of that.”

Horror climbed up into Miranda’s throat, and she dropped the ring back into her skirts as if it were scalding hot. She had known—she had always known that he would lie about anything but, _I can’t,_ she thought, _about this._

She was a widow. She had been one man’s wife, and she would not be another’s. They had talked about it, made their allegiance. They were a monument in stone to the memory of Thomas Hamilton.

 _My sins against God and man._ The words she wanted to say choked her. She couldn’t look at the ring in her lap. “Can I not keep the one I have?”

A silence. Behind her, she could hear James tidying their dinner plates—a wasted effort, as the things they intended to bring back to London with them were already packed. “You were painted with it,” he said finally, “with Thomas’s ring.”

Easy for him to ask this of her. He had always had the privilege of choosing his own betrayals.

* * *

When they left Nassau, Miranda looked back like Lot’s wife at the walls of solid rock that had been no proof against James’s guns. He had given years of his life to that island; made his home there; fancied himself its saviour. He loved Nassau. The ruined fort was what that looked like.


	2. Chapter 2

Some part of her had not really believed that James would leave Nassau. She thought that when it came time to depart, the island would hold him like an anchor. If she had not stirred herself to raise a proper fight over what he was planning, it was because she hadn’t thought she would need to. Nassau would do it for her, that fucking island James had given his life to because he couldn’t give his life for Thomas. By the time she understood fully that he was in earnest, it was too late to turn back.

When she realized, she fought. After ten years, she knew where to find the chinks in his armour, how best to prise them open.

She said: “England took Thomas from us, and you want me to believe that you’ll go begging on your knees to them now?”

She said: “You’ll let go of Captain Flint just like that? After all your years in making him?”

She said: “Nobody will thank you for it. Not the pirates of Nassau, not the merchants of London. They’ll all hate you just the same.”

In the ordinary way of things, James would have fought back. But the worst he did now was to turn his head away from her, or occasionally leave the cabin to sleep on the deck. She entertained fantasies of pushing him over the side of the boat and watching him disappear into the dark, endless water. Better he should die quickly at her hand, than be torn apart by the hungry-eyed vultures in Parliament.

She said, weeping and spent: “What can you possibly _gain_ by it?”

“It’s not about what _I’ll_ gain,” he said; “you know that.” Yes, she knew. Though he was looking at her, she knew that he didn’t see her. Always, always when he talked of his ambitions to Nassau, it was Thomas he saw.

It was Thomas he needed,Thomas with his wondrous certainty and the pure clear light of his love, that banished back any possible spectre of shame. Miranda was only herself.

* * *

Before losing Thomas, she had never been on a sea voyage. “We’ll go to Paris one day,” Thomas used to say, “and Greece, and Rome.”

Not _I’ll take you,_ but _we’ll go._

* * *

_Do you know what he told me about you?_ Eleanor Guthrie had once asked Miranda, intending to wound her.

At first Miranda thought it was a noise above deck that woke her. James, who was a sailor, could sleep through anything, but she could not accustom herself to the perpetual noise of a ship: the sailors’ laughter when they told ribald stories, the insouciant sheer of a violin over the notes of a sea shanty, the never-ending racket of boots and bare feet against wood a few feet above where she lay. She inhaled deeply, listening, but it was quiet on the decks.

“I’m sorry,” whispered James. He meant, for waking her. “I need to tell you something.”

She made to roll over and face him, but he put an arm over her waist, arresting the movement. So it was that kind of _something._ “What is it?”

“It’s about Hal,” James said, and stopped. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest, the way his breath quickened as he spoke. “I need to tell you. He didn’t—” and here James stopped again, and she heard him swallow.

She had not suspected this, but it didn’t surprise her, for all that Hal Gates was James’s oldest friend in Nassau. Once or twice over the years, he had been to their house. He called her _ma’am,_ and would not sit if she was standing, but he never spoke to her if he could help it, only to James. Maybe he was one of those pirates who thought it was bad luck for their crewman to have someone like her in port, to whom he was faithful. Maybe James had issued some decree relating to her, the terms of which Gates was endeavouring to honour.

She knew James loved him. She knew he made James laugh.

When James had returned from the island on his warship—hair stiff with salt, fresh wounds scabbing over—he had told her the ships had wrecked and Gates had died. She saw now that he had left space in between, and she hadn’t noticed. After ten years, she should have known better.

He tilted his head, his nose touching the knobs of her spine, and she shivered agreeably. “He meant to take his ship and leave. I didn’t see how else—”

“If you didn’t see another way,” Miranda said quickly, “it’s because there wasn’t one.”

James was silent for so long that Miranda wondered if he had fallen back to sleep. The weight of his arm held her still. It wasn’t like him to keep secrets from her, but he had loved Hal Gates. Miranda said, “I forgive you, if that’s what you need.”

“I don’t know what the fuck I need.”

Miranda thought she knew, though James would have sneered at her if she’d said it. He needed to make it all mean something: losing Thomas, killing Hal, the Urca gold, the truths he told by lying, and most of all the lies he would tell with the truth, to the merchants and politicians in London who held Nassau’s fate in their hands. She rolled over and touched their foreheads together, rested her hand against his too-hot cheek.

“I love you,” James said, in that stiff way of his, as if he were issuing a formal statement about a vote that had gone against him, so that it could be noted down in the ship’s log and consulted later.

She kissed him. The rolling of the ship made a satisfying fuck difficult, but he put his fingers inside her and bit her collarbone and told her to come for him. She liked to watch him during sex because there was always a moment—even now—just before he spent, when his face went blank with pleasure and she could see James McGraw in him again.

Eleanor Guthrie had said, with quiet venom, _Nothing._

A shot that went wide of its mark. Eleanor Guthrie didn’t know James, not his first name and not his real name and not the most fundamental fact of him: The more a thing mattered, the closer he held it to himself.


	3. Chapter 3

While James paced the deck with Peter Ashe, strategizing over how best James might debase himself to gain clemency for the pirates of Nassau, Miranda looked after Abigail. She had been a sweet child and was grown into a gentle and confiding young lady. She jumped when sailors shouted down from the rigging, and shadows under her eyes testified that she slept no better at night than Miranda, but she seemed otherwise unscarred by her ordeal.

She liked to sit on the quarterdeck, writing in her journal while Miranda read, periodically setting her pen down to speak her thoughts aloud. “I’m glad to be going back to London,” she told Miranda. “I hardly know my father, and I would have missed my mother.”

By mother she meant stepmother. Her own mother, Celia, had died when Abigail was only a baby. Miranda remembered how Peter had grieved. Those were the years in which he had become such a dear friend to herself and Thomas, dining at their house most nights, when he couldn’t bear to dine alone.

“And,” Abigail added, “I’m afraid Charles Town would seem a backwater, after London.”

Yes, a backwater. A backwater where men like James dangled at the end of ropes, while men like Peter watched and called it justice. She wondered if spinets in Charles Town stayed in tune.

She forced the thought from her mind and focused on the girl in front of her. “What do you like to do in London? It’s been so many years since I was there, I hardly remember what amusements it has to offer.”

“Oh, ever such a lot of things.” Abigail’s eyes were bright. “My dear friend Elizabeth has an aunt who only came to London last year, and she never seems to tire of seeing the sights. Lizzie has the oddest taste for horrid things! You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but she loves to go and see the lunatics at Bedlam. Her aunt _speaks_ to them, if you can imagine it! Lizzie told me they spoke to a woman who believed she was a prophet of God, but everything she said was so very— Lady Wallingford?”

That was her. She was Lady Wallingford. No, she was Mrs McGraw. She was Miranda. Her head felt so light she thought that she might float away. She did not want Abigail to know that anything was amiss. “The poor unfortunate,” she managed.

“Yes,” said Abigail solemnly. “They are a lesson to us to give thanks to God for our good sense. Did you ever go to see them when you were in London? It is very diverting, and only costs a penny for the poor-box and another for the porter.”

Miranda always wondered who had found Thomas’s body. When Peter wrote to tell them what had happened, he said very little of the mechanics of it. The idea that it might have been a visitor—a child like Abigail, a stern-faced minister in a black hat, an apprentice and his sweetheart on their half-day—made her feel ill.

Six months after she and James killed Alfred Hamilton, Miranda had looked up and found that her mourning for Thomas was at an end. She had not ceased to miss him, but she was no longer ambushed by the kind of all-consuming sorrow that left her sleepless and raw, tell-tale red eyes from weeping when James came home.

Half a decade on, she saw that she had only built a dam for her grief. Now, in the company of those who had known him, that dam began to crack and shiver and threaten to let past the floods. She did not know if she was strong enough to survive its onslaught a second time.

“But of course,” Abigail went on, watching Miranda’s face anxiously, “I didn’t mean to say that— You are a lady, and the wife of an earl’s son, and so you— I’m so terribly sorry, Lady Wallingford. I did not mean to offend you, truly, by talking of what it costs. I only thought—”

Miranda hastened to reassure her. She was proud of the steadiness of her voice as she promised that she was not offended nor insulted, that she had been living on a very small income for years and saw no shame in being poor. She did not mention the bagful of black pearls that she and James had always kept hidden amongst her clothes, in case of great need. She did not look down to the lower decks, where James and Peter planned the ugly lie they would make of what Thomas had felt for James. She did not think of Thomas in Bedlam, his blood soaking into the straw and the stone floors.

(When he was sick, she would let nobody else attend him; not because she was such a very good nurse, but because he was always so surprised, so childishly pleased, to find her willing to stay with him. _You don’t have to,_ he used to insist, curled up around a cough, but when she stroked his forehead with a cool hand, he shivered contentedly and shut his eyes.)

James did not return to their cabin until very late that night. Miranda waited up for him, curled up on the bed in the dark because she could not justify the extravagance of a candle. When he came in, he must have seen her at once, because he took no care to hush the sound of the cabin door closing and latching behind him.

“I don’t want you to do this,” Miranda said. She spoke softly. By now she knew how sound carried through a ship.

In the darkness, she could hear him taking off his boots, hanging his jacket over the little bolted-down desk, undoing buckles as he stripped down to his shirt.

“Did you hear me?” she said, her voice rising.

James set his sword down on top of his coat, a dull and final sound. “Yes.”

“I don’t want you to be—looked at the way they’ll look at you. Like watching a bear-baiting, or.” Abigail’s sweet clear voice rang in her ears: _Did you ever go to see the lunatics in Bedlam?_ Her eyes were wet, but he couldn’t see. They were shadows to each other in the dark of the cabin, fuzzy outlines of the movements they each made.

The bed shifted as James sat down on it. He rested a hand on her bare ankle, scraped an uneven fingernail lightly against the back of her leg. “I’ve had worse than a few rich fucks looking down their noses at me. It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. You haven’t.” She wrapped her hand around his wrist and squeezed tight. “Thomas told me to look after you. He made me promise.”

“I won’t use his name,” said James quickly, as if he had been anticipating the objection. “When I tell the tale of what I’ve—what I’ve _been,_ I’ll only talk about myself. Peter’s agreed to that. There won’t be any hint that he and I were—”

His voice hitched, and Miranda wanted to put an ocean between him and anyone who could ever harm him, and she wanted, also, to cut his glib tongue out of his lying fucking mouth. As if Thomas would have cared for a moment about his name and reputation, when it was the truth at stake, and James’s happiness to boot. She could not imagine a way to more thoroughly betray his memory, and she was standing aside and letting James do it.

“I don’t want it for _you,_ ” she said. “Thomas is dead.”

James inhaled sharply. If Miranda were one of his men, he would have hit her, or worse. If James were Thomas’s widow, he would never have left off mourning. He would have worn black for Thomas until the day he died.


	4. Chapter 4

They order the spinet to celebrate James’s first success on the _Walrus,_ and he not-quite jokes that he intends to adorn her with diamonds and pearls, too, to make up for all the rest.

“There’s nothing to make up for,” Miranda says. James cocks an eyebrow at her to show that he knows she’s lying, but he doesn’t challenge her. Peace between them is always hard-won these days. They do not want to disturb it.

When the supply ship comes at Christmas, they receive word that the spinet was damaged in a storm on the journey out from England. The merchant offers to let them have it for half the price and repair it themselves, which James declines. Miranda finds it incredible that there is nobody on the island capable of mending a broken spinet, but James scowls and tells her that he has requested a replacement.

“It doesn’t matter,” Miranda says. “I don’t need it.”

“Well, I’ve already done it,” says James shortly. Then, annoyed: “The fuck it doesn’t matter. You should have your—” He gestures at their home, the bare bones of it.

She knows that he hates her life here. He hates his own life, too, but that is within his power to shape, and so he minds it less. Through bitter experience, she knows there’s no winning. If she admits to what she really feels about Nassau he’ll be angry with her. If she puts on a brave face he’ll be angry with himself for necessitating it.

“I’d rather have you.” The truth of this has worn thin with repetition, she knows, and James never exactly believed her in the first place.

“Yes, well.” James gets to his feet and paces, working off nervous energy. “Well,” he says, “I’d like to be able to put in an order for a spinet and get a working bloody spinet.”

Trying to make him laugh, she says, “You don’t even like music.”

James shoots her a look of such astonished injury that she wants to bite off her tongue. Before he met her, he hardly knew what music was, to like it. She dragged him, reluctant, to his first concert: Visconti and Paisible at the Theatre Royal, performing Albinoni’s concertos and Visconti’s own sonata for flute and violin, the latter of which brought tears to James’s eyes. Afterward he stumbled over his thanks, an inarticulacy that charmed her.

“James.”

“I’ll get you the fucking spinet.” He stalks off to the spare bedroom.

A year elapses before he is able to make his words true. A year that sees the exile of the pirate Edward Teach, at the hands of a cold-eyed child named Eleanor Guthrie; a year in which the merchants of the West Indies learn to fear James above all the others. A church is established in Nassau, the first the island has known, and James teases Miranda for attending its services. “What would your father say?” he says, in mock-horror, and Miranda can’t help but laugh.

The supply ship returns at Christmas with the new spinet on board. It carries, too, a letter from Peter, which Miranda convinces James not to read until the New Year. Peter’s rare letters turn James savage and unsocial, and Miranda, selfishly, wants to have him to herself while she can.

In the interim between the last spinet’s delivery and this one’s, James has acquired a crewman who used to be apprenticed to a chorister in Liverpool, and he comes round to tune the spinet. Miranda attends closely to what he does and asks more questions than the sailor—whose name, regrettably, is Thomas—wants to answer. James overpays him.

“Him?” he says to Miranda, after the lad leaves.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Miranda. In truth it’s been longer than she’d like since she fucked anyone besides James. She misses the challenge of learning someone new.

She glances up and finds that James is watching her in that particular way of his, the insolent look that knows she is looking back, and wants him. Deliberately, he puts out a finger and presses a key on the spinet. The note rings in Miranda’s bones. James keeps his finger on the key, long after the note has ceased playing. He says, “Only eighteen months later than I intended.”

Miranda blinks, a slow and deliberate sweep of her eyes up and down the length of him. She wants his hands on her. His fingers, his mouth. He slides his finger off the spinet key and extends that hand to her, like an invitation to dance.

She lets him lead, which is rare for them. He takes her into the bedroom, kisses her when she starts to speak. Unlacing her stays, his eyes are hot on her face, and she tilts her head back, overcome. As he lays her down and licks into her, she cannot stop hearing the note he struck on the spinet. She sobs his name when she comes, and he laughs a little, breathless and happy.

Early, early the following morning, when the sun is just risen and James is breathing in the even, vulnerable way of deep sleep, she rises from their bed and tiptoes into the main room to look at her spinet. She is not such a very talented player, but of course there is nobody to hear her. James intends it, she knows, as a tangible proof of his love, during the days and nights when he has to be—chooses to be—away from her.

The letter from Peter sits unopened.

She supposes that she might as well know what sort of mood the letter will put James in, and she sees very little chance that James truly will leave it for the New Year. So far they have had two letters from Peter, in the nearly two years they have been in Nassau. One to say that he had visited Thomas and found him well, and that if they, Miranda and James, only stayed out of London until the Whitsun season, Peter thought he might be able to secure Thomas’s release.

 _I think that Lord Ashbourne can be made to see reason, given time,_ Peter wrote in the first letter. James read it to her with such hope.

It isn’t his fault. James doesn’t know Alfred Hamilton the way she does. How long and how bitterly the man can hold his grudges.

(James went into town that night and came back very, very drunk, his speech slurred and his eyes fever bright. As he was falling asleep, he murmured, “I don’t know how—to—”)

The second letter said nothing of Thomas, but carried the news of Peter’s marriage. James said, “Does he think I give a fuck about his fucking wife.”

Anyway, this letter is addressed to both of them. She has every right. Miranda crosses the room, scooping up the letter without looking at it, as if retrieving it were secondary to the project of curling up in the chair that stands before the hearth.

Later she will remember the precise motion of her hand, sweeping down for the letter, how her fingers slide along the smooth wood of the spinet. She will remember the feel of the paper and the pleasure of the cool morning air as she settles into her chair to read it. She will remember all of that with such clarity, and then her memories will go serenely blank, shielding her from what she knows must come next.

She must have wept. She must have _screamed._ But in the years that follow, she will remember nothing between sitting down in the chair and James splashing warm water in her face. She will think that Thomas must have been watching from heaven—she can imagine his face, worried and intent—and reached down a hand to pluck away the moment that she learned he was gone.

The next thing she does remember is James’s face. She is on the floor, and he is kneeling beside her, looking very young, and afraid, while he says her name over and over, and _please_ and her name, and she will remember thinking, _What are you so afraid of? I haven’t told you yet._

When she tells him that Thomas is dead, his face shows no surprise, though he can’t have known by reading the letter because the letter is crumpled tight in her fist and she cannot open her hand no matter how hard she tries, no matter how carefully he tries to prise her fingers apart. As if her body is trying to protect him from knowing the worst of it, the choice Thomas made, the choice they drove him to.

“Can you look at me?” James’s eyes are fearful and his voice is shaking, which she cannot understand because there is nothing to be afraid of because the worst thing already happened and a worse thing still and there is nothing left to fear because there is nothing left to hope for because Thomas— And she knows she knows she knows there is no practical difference between Thomas four thousand miles away locked up in Bedlam and she will never see him again, and Thomas four thousand miles away and dead in the ground and she will never see him again, except—

“Don’t, please, _Miranda,_ please,” says James. One hand cups the back of her neck, and the other is pressed against her cheek, wet from where he has splashed water onto it. Her fingers hurt but she cannot unclench her fist.

“I’m sorry,” she tries to say, though she is not sure she succeeds. She knows that he thinks it’s her fault. She knows that it is her fault. She circles around and around the memory of James’s voice in London, scraping over the words _you watch me,_ and what if she had, what if she had, oh God what if she had let him go into Bedlam and fetch Thomas out and what if they had all escaped together and he were here with them in Nassau, what if it were Thomas helping her to her feet and stroking her hair and calling her _love_ but what if James had failed and what if it were James who had died and James’s body swinging at the end of a rope made of Alfred Hamilton’s spite? What if it were Thomas who blamed her and Thomas who bought her a spinet to show he didn’t blame her and Thomas whose hands tremble at her waist as he guides her into bed and pulls the blankets up around her because she cannot stop she cannot control her body from shaking and what if it were Thomas who held her and Thomas whose silent tears fell on the nape of her neck and into her hair? God, God, God, what then?

“Shhh,” James whispers. “Sh, sh, sweetheart, I’m here. I’m here with you.”

He’s speaking so softly that he doesn’t even sound like himself, not like the man he has become. Miranda imagines that she is a very small boat, imperfectly seaworthy, rocking on the waves as she is taken farther and farther out to sea. The cold saltwater laps at her edges and she cannot be sure if it is buoying her up or dragging her down. James is crying against her skin.

* * *

The _Walrus_ is scheduled to sail two days later, but the ship goes, and James stays behind. She does not ask him to stay. She says, “They’ll vote you out if you don’t go.”

“Like fuck,” says James, and goes on reading to her from _The Life of Donna Rosina._

She cannot stop thinking of James saying _you watch me_ the night they lost Thomas, nor of his face when the spinet arrived. What kind of God would make a creature like James and then deny him the power to look after the only people he loved? At least she never entertained any illusions of what she might be to Thomas.

But she entertained them, didn’t she? For such a long while. She made him happy; he was happy; they were. Now Thomas is dead in his cell at Bethlem Royal Hospital alone alone alone and she, weary traveller, oh she—

_I would not wish any companion in the world but you._

She is shaking again, her teeth rattling painfully against each other. James sets aside his book, gathers her into his arms, and presses his face between her shoulder blades. She is being selfish. She is occupying all the space for grief that the house contains, and leaving none for him. “I’m sorry,” she gasps out.

“No,” says James. His voice and touch are gentle. He has been so careful with her these last few days, as if she were an invalid not yet out of danger. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, just—” He draws in an uneven, painful breath. “Just stay with me.”

What a strange thing to say, when he is the one who is always leaving.


	5. Chapter 5

Ten years separated from London, Miranda would have said that she didn’t miss it. Her memories of the place were so inextricable from her life with Thomas that it would have felt like a betrayal to miss the city rather than the man. (God, God, God, she wanted him back, she would do anything, _anything_ to undo the loss of him.) As they disembarked, James’s hand around hers was painfully tight. London smelled the same—smoke and shit and river water powerful enough to blot out the sun. Accustomed as she was to the fish-sand-blood stink of Nassau, Miranda was surprised to find her eyes filling up with tears at the familiarity of London’s smell.

(James had watched her so closely after they lost Thomas. He kept a hand at her waist every moment and became afraid when she was out of his sight. In their cabin on the passage to Nassau, he wept for the first time since Thomas was taken from them.)

“What is it?” James said to her, softly.

She fought back a wave of sheer animal panic. “I don’t think I—”

“I know.” James’s fingers pressed harder against her knuckles, and his breathing was unsteady. She was conscious of him, only. Whatever else happened, whatever he had chosen, she still had the charge of him. She knew he was doing it on purpose, settling her nerves by letting her see that he needed her to be strong, and she resented it and was grateful.

“Lady Wallingford?” said Abigail.

When they came back to London from the country, Thomas used to hand her down from the carriage himself. Once he had said, “Thou art the flower of Cities all,” and it had surprised her and she laughed and he laughed and—

She made herself take a step forward, and another step. If she went into a swoon it would all be easier, but she could not leave James alone with London. With the knowledge that this place had seen the light fade out of Thomas’s eyes because they chose to live without him but he did not choose to live without them.

She left him here. She left him. Ten years had not been enough time for James and Miranda to forgive each other. Another ten would not be enough, another thousand.

At least in Nassau the sun had shone.

“It’s Mrs McGraw now,” she said.


	6. Chapter 6

For the time being, Peter had decided that they were to stay in his London house, while Abigail went to the country to be with her stepmother. Miranda’s primary feeling was relief that she would no longer have to put on a perpetual show of good spirits for the child. Weary from her journey, she did not understand it was an insult until the fourth time Peter Ashe explained that it wasn’t one. Even then she could not muster up much emotion, only a dull and exhausted recognition. Yes, this was what it had been like here, except that in the old days she knew she had only to look up to find that she was held in the warm, fond light of Thomas’s gaze. What else had ever mattered?

She remembered Peter’s house in London. They had been frequent guests here. She remembered.

On that first day, they learned that Eleanor Guthrie had been betrayed by two of the pirates of Nassau, delivered bound and hooded to English justice. She sat now—Peter told them—in a cell awaiting trial. When he learned of it, James’s composure cracked.

“Get her out of there,” he growled at Peter.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Peter. “We haven’t the capital to demand her freedom, and if we had—”

“The _fuck_ we don’t.” James took a threatening step towards Peter as he spoke, his face flushed with anger. After all, the sea journey had been long, and he had known Eleanor Guthrie since she was sixteen years old.

James must remember this house too. Thomas felt so near that Miranda felt as if she might glance behind her and see him standing there.

She said, “Might I suggest that it will hardly make the argument you desire to make, if the King executes a woman of twenty-five for crimes you are prepared to pardon in men twice her age.”

As he usually did, James recovered quickly, relaxed his fists and shoulders, took a step back. “In any case, you won’t have Nassau without Eleanor Guthrie’s help. She controls the street, and she has the loyalty of the merchants, good English citizens whose cooperation you’ll need if our endeavour is to succeed. If you propose to take away their best source of income, you’ll need somebody they’ll listen to. Someone who can promise them a better future, and whom they trust to give it to them.”

“Our endeavour,” said Peter. His eyes were hard.

For the first time, Miranda understood that she believed the endeavour would fail. She rarely let herself have much of an opinion about James’s ideas, because they were forever changing with the circumstances and any one of them might kill him. But she felt a cold premonition of something badly wrong. There was something they had missed, and it would ruin them.

* * *

Very late that night, she woke up and found that James was not in bed. Terror shot through her, and resignation too, as if she had been expecting his loss all along. Then she must get away, she thought blearily. She could not take her revenge on whomever had taken him until she was away from this place. When she was sure that her trembling legs would support her, she got out of bed and went to her trunk to look for a dress to wear that would be inconspicuous, and their small bag of treasures to pawn for ready money.

“Nightmares?” said a voice from behind her.

She must still have been half asleep, for when she looked up, she fancied it was Thomas she saw. James was standing at the window, half concealed behind the curtain, his face a blur in the darkness. Thomas used to hide himself behind curtains, too, and sit in a window-seat to read or think or write letters.

“I suppose so, yes.” Shaky with relief at seeing him, she crossed the room to him, resting her knuckles against his cheek. He tolerated it briefly, then shrugged her off.

“I didn’t account for this,” he said, meaning Eleanor Guthrie, “when I agreed to Peter’s bargain. I have to— It’s another strand to keep hold of.”

James was competent in many of the womanly arts—sewing, of course, and braiding and spinning too. She used to amuse herself by imagining him as one of the Fates. He would not have given up the eye to his sisters at their whim, but kept it and made himself king among them and called it _primus inter pares._

“Does it change anything?” she asked.

He shrugged one shoulder and did not look at her. “I thought, initially, that I would only have to tell my story the one time. But it seems that Peter— It’s going to take more than that. If we want to be sure of success in Parliament, we’ll need to convince the merchants first, and anyone else the Lords might listen to.”

“I see.”

“I don’t have much to bargain with,” said James baldly.

Yes, she understood that. Peter would want to trot James out—his pet pirate, leashed and reformed—in front of as many audiences as might care to listen. James would want not to have to do it more than once or twice. If James wished for Peter’s assistance in securing Eleanor Guthrie’s freedom, the only thing he had to bargain with was his cooperation.

“Why are you doing this?” she said.

James slanted her an incredulous glance. “You know why.”

For Thomas; it was always for Thomas. James always claimed it was, anyway. She knew from bitter experience that it was useless to argue. “If they’re going to pardon the pirates of Nassau, surely they’ll pardon Eleanor Guthrie as well.”

“That isn’t good enough.” James peered out the window as if there were anything to see, with the streets under cover of darkness. “I planned for her to be in Nassau. They’ll need her in Nassau for this to work. I’ve got to find a way to make that clear to them, along with—everything else. You’re wearing his ring.”

The subject change was so abrupt that Miranda took a moment to parse what James was saying. “There’s no one to see it. I’ll change it for the other one before I go downstairs in the morning.” She had put the old ring on before going to sleep. The weight of the false one was unfamiliar, treacherous. “What are you going to say to them? How are you going to tell—your story, and keep Thomas out of it?”

All she could see of James’s face was the hard line of his jaw. “That my affair with you wasn’t enough for my—appetites. That I used his name and his money to procure companionship. It will hardly be the worst indecency the Lords can imagine.” __  
  
She wished that James would kill every man in the House of Lords and leave London a smoking ruin. Then she would not be at the mercy of Peter Ashe’s gratitude for his daughter’s life. They would know to fear her, then.

Taking her silence for scepticism, James went on, “Peter has a connection, someone who can bribe one of the molly-houses to confirm it, if anyone questions the truth of the story.”

The truth was that James had loved Thomas. For his goodness and his brilliance, mind and body. Nobody would know that, and James could never tell.

He looked at her over his shoulder. “It won’t paint you in a very flattering light either. Do you mind?”

Thomas would have minded—for her, for James. Thomas would not have stood for it. Without regard for propriety or money or practicality or the law, he would have put himself squarely between Miranda and James and the shame they were courting. That was what he had done, wasn’t it? He gave himself up for them.

“I don’t care what they think of me,” Miranda said finally. She had learned something, after all, from her years with James. How to sift through the available truths to find one that sounded like the answer to a question one did not wish to answer. Before James had time to think about it, she kissed his mouth at an odd and sideways angle. “Come back to bed, darling.”

After so long in Nassau, they were sensitive to the English chill, and it was a long time before Miranda was warm enough to fall asleep. Inescapably, she thought of Thomas. He would have considered it blasphemy for James to make this of their story. She argued hotly with an imaginary Thomas. _You killed yourself. Don’t talk to me of blasphemy._

At breakfast the next morning, she remembered that suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground. The realization turned her bread to ash in her mouth.


	7. Chapter 7

Miranda is nine years old, and she is going to see a rhinoceros.

She doesn’t understand what it is, exactly. Her next-oldest sister, Louise, learned of it from the butcher’s boy and teased until their eldest brother, Robert, agreed to take them to see. Miranda understands that she is going on an adventure, to see a sort of creature that has never been seen before in all of civilization. When she asks Robert for the fifteenth time what the rhinoceros will look like and what it will do, he swats her hand and tells her to be quiet or he’ll take her home. She doesn’t think he really will, without seeing the animal himself, but she doesn’t want to risk it. She relishes the idea that there is a world outside of what she knows, where there is no civilization and unknowable creatures roam free. This will be her first taste of that world, perhaps her only chance to reach out and touch it with a curious fingertip.

The crowds at the Belle Savage are stifling, and Miranda is the smallest child there, not counting her sister Isabel, who is five and does not care about the rhinoceros. She has fallen half asleep on Robert’s shoulder. The older girls, Louise and Anne, have already pushed ahead to get a proper look at the rhinoceros, but when Miranda tries to go after them, Robert catches her shoulder and pulls her back.

“Miri, don’t move out of my sight!” he commands.

“But—” She swallows her protest, knowing it will do no good.

“Sir,” says a voice, clear and high. “Sir, I’ll take her to see.”

Miranda looks around. So she isn’t the youngest child. Here is a boy smaller than her, with fair hair and blue eyes, who seems to entertain no doubt that he will be given permission to take Miranda to the front of the crush of people. He has the look of someone who knows a very good secret and will tell it to the person who best pleases him.

“He’ll hit you,” she says, meaning Robert.

The boy dares a glance up at Robert. “My uncle won’t let him.” He does not sound quite certain; Robert is very tall.

“My brother hits everyone.”

“My uncle’s an Honourable.”

Above both their heads, Robert is stammering something at a man even taller than he is. More importantly, he has let go of Miranda’s shoulder and is not watching her. When the boy takes her hand and tugs her forward, she lets him do it. They are small enough that they are easily able to make their way through the crowd. The boy waits politely for other people to shift so that he can dart in between them, but Miranda is not above shoving.

The rhinoceros does not look like anything Miranda has ever seen before, grey and squat and huffley. She wants to touch, to find out if its skin is soft or rough, only that the men in charge keep saying things like “Don’t come near it” and “Right bruiser, he is.” If she does something naughty, Robert will take them all home. Also she does not want the rhinoceros to huff and stomp his paw at her.

She looks sideways at her new friend. His blue eyes are wide as saucers. If it were not for the fact that he is holding tight to her hand, she would suppose that he was not in the least afraid.

“It looks like a very ugly unicorn,” Miranda says.

She doesn’t expect him to listen to her, but the boy lets out a peal of laughter like a church bell and turns to her with his eyes full of delight. “It does, it does!” he cries. “Do you know, that’s how they took it out of the East Indies!”

“How?” Miranda says it distractedly. Behind them, she can hear Robert calling her name. He sounds angry. If he is angry with her anyway, mightn’t she just as well touch the rhinoceros as not?

“Like a unicorn,” says the boy. “They brought a maiden near it, and it lied down and fell asleep with its head in her lap. Then they were able to take it, easy as anything.”

“I don’t believe you!” If it is true, Miranda thinks that she wouldn’t like to be the girl who has to sit and wait with that great snorting beast in her lap, for men with ropes to come and take it away. Like waiting to be eaten up by a dragon. The rhinoceros paws one of its legs again. She is not sure she does want to touch it, after all.

The boy says, “My uncle says so.”

“Your uncle’s a liar.”

Miranda knows those are fighting words, but the boy takes them in stride. Maybe he knows, just as she does, that even the most beloved adults lie to children when it suits them. He leans into Miranda, just as if he were one of her sisters, tired from a long day. He is bigger than Isabel, but not by much. More from instinct than anything else, Miranda puts her arm around him, and he makes a surprised sound that she feels as a vibration against her shoulder.

They stand and look at the rhinoceros. Its legs are bound with stout ropes, which the men pull tight to stop it from stamping. There is another rope around its big white horn, and it is panting heavily. She doesn’t exactly wish she hadn’t come, but she wishes— Oh, she doesn’t know what she wishes. If the world were different in some way, and she is not sure how exactly, she thinks she would find everything more satisfactory. She cannot see the boy’s face, but the delighted energy has burned out of him rather, and she wonders if he is thinking the same as her.

The boy says something in a low voice.

“What?” says Miranda. Everyone around them is noisy and jostling. In another minute, Robert will find her, and she’ll be in trouble.

“I said I have a book about it!” the boy shouts. “With pictures. I bet it says about the maiden.”

Angrily, Miranda shoves him away from her. She doesn’t want him to say more about the maiden; she wants to know that he knows that something here is wrong. “Well I don’t have your bloody book!” she says, swearing at him like a boot-boy.

The next thing she knows, she is being swung up into the arms of a tall, laughing stranger. She screams, and the stranger says, in a voice that is somehow exactly like the little boy’s, “Now, now, what a to-do! I only mean to hand you back to your brother, seeing that it’s my own nephew who’s gotten you into trouble.” With a stern look down, he adds, “As he always does,” but Miranda cannot see the boy, to see if he is chastened by his uncle’s reproof.

After the uncle gives her back to Robert, she is made to hold his hand on one side and Isabel’s on the other. Louise and Anne have been rounded up too, and they all go home without anyone but Miranda getting to see the rhinoceros. Robert slaps her for making him waste his hard-earned money, and Isabel cries because she doesn’t like for anyone to slap Miranda, and then Robert slaps Isabel, too. After dinner that evening, Miranda finds that someone—Louise, probably, who is spiteful—has pulled out all the seams in her mending, so she has to do it all again.

* * *

Two days later, a package arrives with her name on it. There is a book inside: _A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts,_ with a card that says, in a not-very-good hand, _from The Right Honble. The Viscount Wallingford._

“It seems our girl has made a conquest,” says her father, pleased. She doesn’t know what a conquest is. She can’t remember ever having pleased her father before. If she comes to his attention at all, it is usually for some misbehaviour, like whispering in church. She can’t decide if she likes it. She knows she wants the book.

“I don’t know who Viscount Wallingford is,” Miranda admits.

“Little Lord Wallingford is Thomas Hamilton when he’s at home,” her father says, “only son of the Earl of Ashbourne. Robert told me that you became friends at Belle Savage.”

Only then does she remember the little boy who promised to send her his book about rhinoceroses, and she puts out a hand for her book. She has never had a book all her own. When she tightens her fingers around it, not sure if it’s real, she finds the cloth cover solid. Most often, people break their promises. That much she is old enough to know.

Did they become friends? She swore at him.

“Father,” she says, daring. “Do you know if—”

“No more questions, Miranda.” Her father has stopped listening to her. “You must write him back a very pretty letter. I shall read it after you write it, to be sure that you have said everything that is right.”

Which means that she may keep the book.


	8. Chapter 8

Miranda had expected that they would have a quiet summer, time enough for her and James to become accustomed to London after all their years away. Too, she had thought there would be opportunities for her to sway James against the plan he and Peter had concocted between them. On the ship she had tried to weaken him, which could never have worked—she knew that, when she gave herself a moment to think. What was required was a lighter touch, to tap at his certainty just slightly, here and here, weaken the foundations so that it would be ready at any moment to come crumbling down.

Instead, they arrived to find that nobody had any thought of quitting London for the country. The coronation and its many delays had prevented Parliament from beginning at its usual time in November of last year, and Peter reported that sessions were expected to continue through July, if not beyond.

The days at Peter’s home quickly fell into a pattern. After breakfast, Peter and James shut themselves up in Peter’s office and read the newspapers and the latest pamphlets, and talked and planned. They were not yet ready to present their case to the Lords or the Council of Trade and Plantations, but they had begun their preliminary efforts. They had gone twice to Lloyd’s, where James had told Peter’s version of his story to shipping merchants who had stayed in London for the summer. The Southern Secretary, General Stanhope, had also consented to a meeting, in which they attempted to persuade him to advocate their cause to the King. Whatever the day brought, Peter and James were home punctually for dinner, and then James and Miranda would retire to their rooms.

James, being James, said little of the meetings. But the toll they took on him was clear. He was snappish with her on those evenings and could not bear to be touched even briefly.

“What happened?” she made the mistake of asking, after he met with Stanhope.

“He remembers you,” James said, with a faint, mean smile.

For a moment she searched her memory for someone called Stanhope, before realizing that James was making a joke. She supposed it was a joke, the insinuation that any man in London might have cause to remember her. Coming from that quarter, it hurt more than James had probably meant it to.

He saw it on her face and said quickly, “I’m sorry.”

“Go to the devil,” she snapped. James went away and slept somewhere else—she didn’t ask where—and they were more careful with each other after that.

In a nauseating, distorted way, her life now was very like her life with Thomas when they had first met James. Miranda wondered if the symmetry had struck James too, but she didn’t ask. The thought of talking about Thomas with James here, now, made her feel as if all the skin had been flayed off her body.

(They flogged men in Bedlam. She had heard that once, somewhere. Hadn’t she?)

When she was Thomas’s wife, she had friends in London, people who could receive her in spite of her reputation, because her husband was heir to an earl. She knew that nobody would want her in their social circle now, which cut surprisingly deep considering that she had gone without those women for a decade. They would be curious about her, of course, and maybe they would even like her given the opportunity—she was good at making people like her—but they couldn’t admit her into their homes.

Because her days were empty, and Peter had a study that she had never seen him use, she went into it now and then and sat down at his perfectly arranged desk and thought of letters she might write. She took out Peter’s paper and pens and inkpots, and moved them around the desk as if her hands were trying to remember the mechanics of letter writing. Then she put them back in their places again.

She spent most of her time in Peter’s library. Back home—Miranda caught herself thinking of Nassau as home, though it never had been—she had depended on James to bring back books from his hauls. When his captaincy was young, it had been nearly impossible even when they took ships with a book-loving captain or mate, because books were heavier than valuable, and the men were reluctant to bring them on board. When Pastor Lambrick came over from England, with a library of nearly a hundred books, she had been willing to do just about anything to stay in his good graces. For two years he would not lend her any of the classics, only the sternest religious texts.

But oh, in Peter’s home. Like a girl from the provinces, she had walked into his library and let out a reverent, hushed gasp, as if she were seeing the face of God. He had books of poetry, and the kind of philosophy that she and Thomas used to read together and tear apart in their conversations over dinner. When she saw that he had _Paradise Lost,_ she started to cry.

“Of course there are more in the country,” said Peter airily.

Miranda shot James a glance behind Peter’s back. Peter had always been ambitious, and it was no discredit to him that he was trying to assemble a good library, but—

“Pompous ass,” said James that night.

“Your ally,” said Miranda, and turned on her side to face away from him.

She could only fill so many hours of the day with reading. When she tired of sitting still, she walked the streets of London alone—a novelty. Ten years she had been away, and London had been here all that while, breathing smoke into the lungs of its inhabitants and erecting new buildings and tearing down old ones and robbing tourists blind.

As a girl, she had known these streets like her own name: which ones she might walk down by herself and which with her sisters and which not at all; where to get a good cut of meat at a reasonable price, and ribbons as a treat for Isabel when she had a spare penny. Then Thomas married her, and that life was lost to her. And then—

She took Peter’s coach to Cornhill, where the booksellers were, to find if the Sultan’s Head was still there. For years it had been her and Thomas’s favourite haunt. Dinah Hoddy, who owned the place, used to keep the bench nearest the fire for them. Miranda would tuck herself unobtrusively between the flame-warmed wall and Thomas’s body, and they would order drinks and read the newspapers and listen to the hubbub of conversation around them.

(The soft, worn wood under her fingers. Dinah Hoddy’s tart remarks. Thomas often ordered tea, and she teased him for it. “We are in a coffeehouse,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows at her in an attitude of elegant and lordly condescension. “You,” he said haughtily, “are drinking ratafia.”)

 _It won’t be there,_ she told herself. But when she saw the old coffeehouse sign gone, she still had to press a hand to her heart to dull the ache. The new sign said _Waller._ She went in, just to see.

Inside it was the same, exactly, newspapers on the walls and a crowd of men shouting excitedly at each other to be heard. The rich, dark scent of coffee was so familiar that she thought she might look into the corner by the fire and see Thomas sitting there, his eyes intent on whatever inflammatory sermon or pamphlet he was reading.

The owner came nervously up to her and asked if she was lost.

“No,” she said, “no, I—do you know whatever became of Dinah Hoddy?”

He glanced to one side, evidently nervous that she was going to begin raving. “Er. Of who?”

“Dinah Hoddy,” said Miranda, summoning up her best impression of the viscountess she used to be. “She owned the Sultan’s Head.”

“Oh, I see. No, madam. That’ll have been before my time.”

She nearly bid him ask his customers, except that she happened to look at them. They were all terribly, disastrously young. They would not remember a coffeewoman who had made her way stoutly and alone, all of a decade ago.

* * *

She planned to get home and talk to James, to remind herself of what she had given up her old life for, but of course it wasn’t possible. When she walked in, taking off her gloves, she could hear him arguing with Peter in the parlour, his voice low and furious in the manner that would have meant, if they were still in Nassau, that a murder was imminent.

She felt tired down to the marrow of her bones. Was it so much to ask for James’s attention for a moment, for a fucking _moment_? Was it so impossibly selfish to want him to have been listening for her step the way she always used to listen for his? She did not even quite know what she wanted to tell him—that the London streets, that she, that the Sultan’s Head, that everything was gone and changed, and the lack of them, God how the merciless _lack_ felt like falling, and falling, and falling.

Without regard for the tacit agreement that she would hold herself separate from James’s plans with Peter, Miranda slipped into the parlour and stood with her back against the door, watching. James was slouched in his chair, looking bored, while Peter leaned forward in his, face flushed and voice raised. “Do you understand,” he was saying, “how much you have been granted on credit?”

James’s voice was thick with contempt. “Oh, please. Explain to me how vastly it would redound to the credit of the Sea Lords and the prestige of His Majesty’s Navy, to hang as high as Haman a girl hardly older than your daughter. As you know, it has been several years since I was last in civilization.”

He spit out that word, _civilization,_ as if it were a personal insult.

Peter looked away in disgust and saw Miranda at the doorway, but he did not rise in acknowledgement of her presence.

James followed his glance. “Miranda,” he said, getting to his feet.

“When you have a moment?” she said.

She said it to make James follow her. She said it to show Peter that she mattered more, and always would, than whatever it was he thought James should care about. Less because she _did_ matter more than because James wanted to be away from his quarrel with Peter, it worked.

“Certainly,” James said, and to Peter: “If you will excuse me.”

Once, long ago, she told James that he was good at managing how he was perceived. Since then she had come to understand that he was better still at managing how the people around him perceived themselves. He did it with the smallest nuances of tone, the faintest quirk of an eyebrow or lip. Just now he was looking down his nose at Peter in a way that managed to convey both disinterest in the discussion and disdain for Peter’s choice to remain seated while a lady was standing.

“I will not—” Peter began, but James was already halfway to the door. Miranda felt a nasty surge of satisfaction.

(She did not like who she was, in London, without Thomas, nearly without James.)

Out in the hall, James cradled Miranda’s elbow in his hand. “Are you all right? You don’t look like yourself.”

“Yes. What were you arguing about?”

Something she did not recognize flickered in James’s face, a hard helpless thing. “We have a difference of opinion, that’s all.”

“About Eleanor Guthrie.”

“Yes.”

She knew the answer was _yes_ already, so she could not say why she felt a wrench in the pit of her stomach. “Is the King unwilling to pardon her?”

“Not exactly.”

“James,” said Miranda, meaning, _don’t make me chase down the answer like a hound treeing a fox._ Not that she cared. If she cared about anything, it was why James had so much energy to expend on Eleanor Guthrie, when Thomas—

“There is some question,” James said, “as to the advisability of sending her back to the bosom of her loving family.”

Caught up in thinking about Thomas, and herself, and what _family_ meant to James, it took Miranda a moment to understand what James was driving at. “You mean to have her ask them to fund the expedition to Nassau?”

James quirked his mouth at her.

Trust James to require less than a fortnight to turn Eleanor Guthrie’s imprisonment from a liability to an asset. If she were let out of prison, she would know that she owed her freedom to James. If her family funded the expedition to Nassau, it would not be Peter who guided its priorities.

Miranda should have been pleased, but she was in no mood to be pleased. While James solved other people’s problems, she had not the first idea of how to go about finding where Thomas was buried. It would have been cruel to ask for James’s help, but she needed his help desperately.

“Was there anything you needed me for?” James asked, jerking his head back toward the parlour where Peter presumably waited. The feeling that he had read her mind startled Miranda.

“I was tired of Peter,” she said.

“Let me handle Peter.”

Miranda sighed, more sharply than she meant to. It was always _let me handle it_ until he washed up at her door—their door—two weeks later than he had promised with bullet holes through his shoulder and rope burns on his hands.

“Trust _me,_ ” James said, trying again.

She did. That was the problem.

Beyond the parlour door, they heard Peter say impatiently, “For God’s sake!” Miranda bit her lip to keep a laugh in, and James’s eyes had a light in them that she had badly missed. Impulsively, she put out a hand and pressed her thumb against his bottom lip.

James met her eyes, licked the pad of her thumb; and a thrill went through Miranda. At least this part was easy, had always been easy. _Oh, I have you,_ she thought, vicious and hungry, and she watched the ripple of his throat as he swallowed. With heavy-lidded eyes, he said, “Did you find London satisfactory?”

“Mm,” said Miranda. He liked her fingers; he had liked Thomas’s. His breath was hot on her skin.

James said, “Tell me,” in the low, commanding voice she loved.

She thought of the coffeehouse. She thought of her nascent idea to find out where Thomas was buried. “Do you remember the Sultan’s Head?”

“Yes!” James said, bright as the sun coming out through the clouds. _There you are,_ Miranda thought, desperate; _oh, there you are._ “God, yes. Dinah Hoddy wouldn’t give me chocolate. I’d no notion it would still be there.”

“No, it wasn’t. Someone else owns it. It wasn’t the same.” She meant to communicate some part of what she had felt at finding the place gone, the predictability of it after ten years away, but also how much it hurt to uncover evidence of London’s inconstancy.

James’s face shuttered so abruptly and so completely that Miranda was startled, and he jerked his head away from her touch.

“James—” she said.

“A trying day for you, then.” The words were like a slap. He sounded raw, a still-bleeding wound; he had controlled his face but not his voice.

“I didn’t say that it was—”

James said, a little remote now, “If there was nothing else, I should get back to Peter.”

“Wait,” she said. James waited—when she asked him outright to do a thing, he usually did it—but his eyes were not focused on her anymore. He was thinking of the future and Peter Ashe and Parliament. She was not, and had never been, what mattered to him here.

When he had gone back into the parlour and shut the door behind him, she put her back to the wall and slid down it, the coarse fabric of her dress hitching against the knots in the wood. As she wrapped her arms around her knees, she half-wished that James and Peter would come out and find her. James would have to look at her, then. He would have to contend with what she was telling him.

Always they told each other that everything they did was for Thomas, and maybe one of them still believed it. If she resisted, no matter how slightly, he treated her like—like the wooden horse, outside the walls of Troy, and he the priest crying vainly for caution, _timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,_ righteous in his objection though it would cost him everything.

With a spike of clarity, she saw now that the walls he was defending had nothing to do with Thomas, and everything to do with his bloody-minded devotion to, idolatry of, his own guilt. What part of this would Thomas have countenanced? Thomas, who had laid down his life so that James might be free? And now James walked with open eyes into room after room filled when men who hated him, and spoke the lies that he and Peter had concocted between them, and Thomas and Miranda might as well never have existed.

Didn’t she deserve more than that from him, by now? After she had given him her loyalty, her allegiance.

If she asked him, he would only raise an eyebrow and say, “Given whom?” and that would be unanswerable. Even to herself, she could not prove that she had stayed loyal because she loved James. James was not the person to whom she had made promises.

Once upon a time, she envied her husband’s jolly, shouting mornings at coffeehouses, and she told him so. He made the right noises to indicate his regret at the way women were barred from public life, which was not satisfying and he knew it. Then two months later he came to her with a light behind his eyes to say that he had sorted out the matter of the coffeehouse. By then she had forgotten there was a matter of the coffeehouse. He took her into Cornhill and bought them each a book, and they went to the Sultan’s Head to read them. He knew the proprietress already, Dinah Hoddy. He bowed to her so elegantly that she blushed and told Miranda what a lucky woman she was.

“I know,” Miranda had said, and back then she believed she really did.

* * *

Some time very late in the night, Miranda startled herself into alertness, with a jolt that should have woken even so sound a sleeper as James. But when she looked over at him, he was still. He slept on his stomach, and the slight parting of his lips made him look so vulnerable that it twisted at Miranda’s heart to see him. In one respect, he was the only person in the world whose well-being was indispensable to her own, but it was also true that she sometimes woke up and wondered what would happen if she put a pillow over his face and held it there, inexorable, until he stopped struggling.

She slipped out of bed and cast about in the dark for her robe. She wanted to be away from him. Only long enough to clear her head and remember that she loved him, first and foremost, more than she wanted to kill him. Much more. Not a close run at all. It only felt close just now because he was telling Alfred Hamilton’s lie, and she was wise enough to know, at least intellectually, that telling the truth would have been far worse.

Still, she heaved in a deep, clean breath as she walked down the hallway, as if the air in their bedroom had been as smothering as the worst London fog. As she sometimes did, she imagined being dead and meeting Thomas in heaven. She always began the same way: Thomas, lit from within by a sacred flame, glowing and joyful and beloved. She would take his outstretched hand, and she would say, _I looked after James. I did what you asked._

They were childish fantasies, she knew, and she had never told James about them. Tonight she imagined Thomas saying sceptically, _Did you?_ and hot stupid tears filled her eyes.

Trailing her fingers along walls and banisters as if they held some connection to the Miranda she had been ten years ago, she wandered the house. She could not stop thinking of Thomas’s face, his grave and serious eyes.

 _You always want more of me,_ she said to an imaginary Thomas, or possibly an imaginary James.

She was not conscious of having a destination in mind, but her feet carried her back to Peter’s study, and she pushed open the door—wincing at the creak—and went inside. The desk was empty of clutter, though it had paper and pen and ink, and the lamp that rested on it was lit. Like Peter’s library, the room gave the air of being kept, not used. It might have been laid out for her, as if she were expected; there was even a fire in the grate, though it guttered a little.

She sat down at the desk.

She dipped pen in ink and wrote, _To the Governors of Bethlem Royal Hospital._

She thought: _I can’t._

She thought: _I will only write the first sentence, and then—_

If she could not write this letter, she could write a different one. To another of her friends, or to Abigail, or to Thomas’s uncle Benedict, who must have inherited the estate. She knew that Alfred Hamilton had had another child after throwing Thomas away—she remembered it from the letters she had from her lady’s maid—but the boy had been sickly, and died young, not long after Thomas.

Had Thomas ever known that he had a brother? She hoped, distantly, that he had not. He used to say that he wanted her more than he wanted children, but— The hideous irony of the thing was that Alfred need not have gotten rid of Thomas in the way that he did. All he need have done was to tell Thomas that there was a child, and Thomas would have put his whole life into ensuring that the little boy was safe, and loved.

Her eyes were wet.

_I am writing to enquire about my late husband, Thomas Hamilton, the Viscount Wallingford, confined to Bethlem Royal Hospital at the behest of his father in 1705._

She read the sentence over and found that she had not crossed the T in _late._ Breathing as hard as if she had just run a race, she crossed it. A tear splashed onto the paper, smudging the word _hospital._ The part of her that had watched James speak the West Indies into submission thought: _So much the better. Let them see that you still suffer from his absence._

Next she must write that she had remarried, else they would wonder at the name on the letter. She must write, _though I have remarried in the years since his death,_ and in the end she must sign it _Mrs James McGraw._ She pressed her pen against the page and watched the ink make an ugly, irregular circle on the page.

Delicately, she set the letter to one side and brought out a fresh piece of paper. She wrote _Dear Uncle._

“Miranda,” said a voice at the door.

She jolted. At first she thought it must be James, awakened after all, so she put on a little show of incompetence to hide from him what she had been about. Trying to put her pen away and get up from the desk at the same time, she made a conspicuous mess of both. Her feet banged against the desk legs, the papers slid into each other, and, with the hand that her body concealed from the man at the door, she upset the inkpot over the tops of her two letters. “Oh!” she said, and only then did she turn around.

After all that, it wasn’t James but Peter. She could not have said why her heart fluttered unpleasantly, to see him standing there.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Peter.

“No, no,” Miranda said nonsensically. She held up her inky hands and made a comical face, then turned to right the inkpot, and to check that it had indeed obscured the words she had written. When she turned back, Peter was very close. He reached past her—she froze still as a statue, caught between desk and chair—and blotted a handkerchief over the mess of ink.

“Thank you,” Miranda said automatically. Peter stepped back, and she relaxed slightly. “I’m so terribly sorry. I’m afraid your handkerchief will be ruined.”

Not much ink had spilled on the desk—Peter’s handkerchief was sufficient to stop it from dripping—but her hands were a mess. She said, “I should go—” and showed Peter her hands again, to indicate her intended purpose.

“Who are you writing to?” Peter said. He did not move aside to let her leave. When nobody else had been willing to stand by Thomas, Peter had stayed. It had taken real courage.

“To nobody, now, I suppose,” said Miranda, playing for time before remembering that she had a reasonable, and true, answer to give. “I had thought to write to Lord Ashbourne, to Thomas’s uncle. He was always good to us, to the best of his power, and I—well, he might like to hear from someone who misses Thomas as he must do.”

“I see,” Peter said mildly.

Nothing about his words or behaviour threatened her. But abruptly she was very conscious that Peter stood between her and the hallway—between her and James—and he was stronger than her. Her pulse began to race. She had to put an inky hand to her mouth to prevent herself from saying _James will hear me if I scream._

When had she ever been afraid of Peter? Surely in the old days she must have been alone with him often, and she had never felt like this, tremulous and poised for flight. It must be due to the late hour, and the still of the house. She was not really afraid. She would not be diminished by a stupid fancy, a night-time fear that monsters hid behind familiar faces. And anyway it was true that James would hear her if she screamed.

“I,” she said, and required a moment to steady her voice. “I don’t sleep well.”

Peter had not been tense before, but something in him eased when she said that. “It can’t be easy,” he said, “being back here without Thomas.”

When Miranda turned twelve, her father called her into his study, took her by the wrist, and thrust her hand into the fire. It was meant to remind her what hellfire would be like, if she should ever choose the path of sin. She remembered having time to register surprise that it didn’t hurt more, before it started to hurt beyond what seemed possible to bear. Hearing Peter say Thomas’s name felt the same. She cast her eyes down to conceal what she was feeling. “I thought that if—” She gestured to the table. “Never mind. I’m sorry about the mess.”

The ink had soaked right through Peter’s handkerchief, spreading outward in an ugly blotch halfway to the edges. She had nothing with which to supplement it, except her robe, which she could not, of course, remove.

Peter was watching her closely. “Don’t give it another thought.”

She wanted to go back to her room, but the thought of trying to walk past Peter made her breath catch in her throat. If she did not insist on going back to her room, he could not prevent her from going. If she stood very still, then she would be imagining things. She pulled her robe closer around her, remembering too late that there was still wet ink on her hands.

“Might I have paper and ink to use in my own room?” she asked.

Peter laughed. “Miranda! You’re guests, for heaven’s sake. Ask any of the servants, and they’ll see you get anything you need. It’s no different than the carriage, or the meals—I’ve told you you’re to make free with the house. Now come out of there and try and get some sleep. James worries about you.”

He stepped out into the hallway, which gave Miranda space to leave the room herself, without brushing by him and risking getting ink on his clothes too. She walked quickly back to her room, no longer concerned with waking James, just wanting to get out of Peter’s presence as quickly as she could. Probably it was all her fancy, due to the lateness of the hour and the eeriness of the unused room and her own feeling that she was doing something wrong by writing to the Bethlem Governors. She did not like it that Peter had gone to the trouble of telling her that he knew she had taken the carriage.

In the darkness, she scrubbed her hands in hot water and dried them on her robe, which she left in a heap by the basin. James did not wake up, as she had half-hoped he might, so she didn’t tell him about her not-quite-real feeling of danger at the midnight hour.

Morning made a nonsense of the whole thing, and she felt ashamed of herself for being so fearful. She went to a coffeehouse called Tarver’s that was close enough to walk to, but not so close that Peter was likely to frequent it, and wrote her letter to the Bethlem Governors there.

* * *

The King gave Eleanor Guthrie her pardon three days later, not—James told Miranda, who tried to be interested—because he or the Southern Secretary credited Peter’s plan with much chance of success, but because they had other fish to fry. Many of the late Queen’s advisors had been voted out in the recent election, but many more were peers and not so easily dislodged.

“Why bother with a girl from the colonies,” James said, “when you’ve a parcel of Tory nobles to see hanged for treason?”

“What treason did they commit?”

James’s mouth twisted. “They ended the war.”

“And your pardon?” she asked.

She knew that he had not received one. James knew she knew. “Peter’s holding it over me. If I knew what the devil he wanted in exchange, I’d do it, but—”

Miranda remembered believing that Peter would still care about the things he had once cared about. It seemed very far away. “You will have just presented him with his only daughter,” she had said, imagining a version of Peter that was different, younger, better. James had had the right of it, after all, and now they were too deep in to change their minds. If only she had gone to Charles Town with him. If only he had let her do that.

Her head ached with responsibility.

(It wasn’t that Miranda was sure of hell, because she was not, and it wasn’t that she felt sanguine about the idea that the Son of God would return in all His glory to summon bodies from their graves, because she did not.)

Because there was nobody else to stand surety for Eleanor Guthrie, Peter Ashe was vouching for her. He guaranteed her testimony before Parliament, supposing they ever had time for her, and he had taken a house for the two weeks before her ship sailed to Philadelphia. Peter had paid for the ship, too. All of it had to be paid for.

“She’s to live alone until then?” Miranda said. They were in their bed, the room warm enough for once. James lay on his back, and Miranda sat against the headboard, leaning forward to circle her knees with her arms.

“Yes.”

“In the house Peter—a stranger—procured for her, alone?”

James looked uncomfortable. “A lady’s maid has been arranged for.”

“By Peter.”

“No, actually. There’s a—” James traced his moustache with thumb and forefinger. “A contact of Peter’s, a privateer, supplied the lady’s maid. His name’s Rogers. Bristol man. He’s hoping to be made governor in the Bahamas, and I suspect he thinks that he can make use of Miss Guthrie for that. While she’s in Philadelphia—”

Miranda did not give a damn about a privateer named Rogers or what Eleanor Guthrie did when she was in Philadelphia. She did not give a damn whether the lot of them lived or died. Every morning she went to Tarver’s to inquire if there had been a response to her letter to the Bethlem Governors. She didn’t have room to care about anything else.

“—though any man who thinks that girl is working for him is angling to be made a fool. Whatever her family’s financial stake, I—”

(She did not exactly believe in the resurrection of the body, but she had learned it willy-nilly from her father, who was a curate. She had heard him argue that an unborn and unbaptized child should be cut from its dead mother’s womb rather than left to defile the consecrated ground where she was buried. Miranda could picture, as if it were a real memory and not just her fancy, the Risen Christ walking through London and turning His face away from the unhallowed ground where Thomas must have been laid to rest.)

“All right,” she said to James, who was still talking. It was always money; they could not serve both God and mammon, and James had never been a particularly dedicated servant of God. Eleanor Guthrie would go to Philadelphia and she would or would not get money from her family. She would or would not use her resources in a way that was advantageous to James and Peter’s plan. They would or would not get more money still from England, and James and Peter would use it in what way seemed best to them. They would build their fucking empire on the cornerstone of a lie about Thomas that she had not consented to, but that wasn’t what mattered, or what hurt, so much as James’s apparent willingness to pursue Thomas’s plans while letting Thomas himself slip away.

James tilted his head as far back as it would go, looking straight up the headboard, his eyes darting from side to side as if he were reading the future he was creating. “Well,” he said, conceding to Miranda’s lack of interest in Eleanor Guthrie. “The money won’t be of any importance if we can’t get the pardons through Parliament. We had hoped that General Stanhope would take an interest, as he’s a military man, but Walpole’s got him—”

The Bethlem governors had not written back to her the morning after she posted her letter, nor the morning after that. They might be away from the city. She did not know who managed the hospital, or how zealously. Surely someone must be available to receive correspondence. Even if the wealthy went to the country for the summer, there must be some poor fool who stayed behind to answer letters.

If James and Peter succeeded, then Thomas and Miranda would be on people’s minds, and it would be remembered that Thomas was a suicide. Then it would be harder to have him reburied in consecrated ground. The pearls they had brought from Nassau were worth a lot of money, and she knew from her years as Thomas’s wife that with money all things were possible. But it would be better to manage it sooner.

She made one hand into a fist and pressed it against her stomach as hard as she could.

“—only a few months,” James was saying.

Miranda’s stomach lurched, and she opened her eyes. “What?”

After a pause, James looked up at her and said, “Were you listening to any of that?”

 _If you knew,_ thought Miranda. _If you knew what I’m trying to do, then you wouldn’t blame me._ She couldn’t tell him because he couldn’t bear it. Come to that, she wasn’t sure she could bear it herself. “I’m sorry. I find it—very difficult. All of this.”

“I know,” said James.

She touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek, absently, and he turned his face and kissed her knuckles. Muffled against her hand, he said, “We knew it wouldn’t be easy at first.”

Yes: Not at first, and not ever. “There isn’t anything for me here.”

“Don’t—” James drew in a shaky breath. “God. Don’t say that.”

Miranda took her hand away. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. If he had brought her to Charles Town, then she would not have let James agree to shame himself this way, and none of this would be happening. All he need have done was trust her.

“Why are we doing this?” she said plaintively.

Another silence. When Miranda looked at James, she found him gazing up at her thoughtfully, as he considered how to answer. He always did that when they disagreed—he did it with everyone. She could see him thinking, turning the truth over and over in his mind, kneading it into a shape that would fit what he thought she wanted to hear.

“Please don’t do that.”

James knew what she meant, of course. “I’m not.”

“You _are._ You always—” She bit off the reproof before she could finish it. She didn’t want to argue with him; she was so tired of arguing with him.

“We are doing this,” said James, “because it’s what we all want. You know it is.” He was very carefully not saying Thomas’s name. After Thomas kissed him the first time, his face had been tremulous and open. The memory of it hurt.

 _Not this,_ she wanted to say. _Not this lie. Not when Thomas lies dead in unconsecrated ground._

Seeing her reluctance in her face, James kept talking, as he always did. He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow, urgent. “We’re doing it for music, and peace, and we’re too far in it to change our minds now. Miranda. _Miranda._ ”

For him, it was a very heavy-handed effort. He did not mean that he wanted music or peace, but rather that he remembered her saying that she did.

“You opened the door, and I’ve walked through it.” He was pleading now. Already she had given up everything for him—her marriage, her home, the goddamned truth of her own life—and still he was not finished making demands of her.

On the island, they had fought to weeping more times than she could count, but their anger had worn ruts into their arguments—easy to fall into, but no fresh damage done. Here in London, everything conspired to make Miranda feel that she had been laid bare to bone: waiting for the Bethlem governors to write her back, and the threatening bulk of Peter’s shoulders in the lamplight, and the Sultan’s Head, and the carriage that was not hers, and the spectre of Thomas that hovered over them. She wanted to hurt James for subjecting her to it, but she could not hurt him without hurting herself too. The years had taught that to them both, if nothing else.

She realized that James was still waiting for her to answer. _I love you so much,_ Thomas had said, and, _Promise me._

“Yes,” said Miranda, “fine. Just as you like. I’m tired.”

After they had put out the lights, she could feel James watching her in the darkness. _If you knew,_ she thought, _God, if you knew._


	9. Chapter 9

People whisper—where Miranda can hear, sometimes, because sometimes her hearing is the point of the exercise—that Thomas’s devotion to her is unseemly. His eyes find her too often in a crowd, sometimes to the point of rudeness. His smiles are too markedly fond, his touch too frequent and too familiar for decency. What they don’t know, and could never understand, is that her closeness with Thomas is hard-won, the triumphant result of a battle they both had to fight against the world. When you have fought side by side with someone, you are careful of them after.

Maybe that’s why she proposes spending a morning at the Mall, the three of them. Because she relishes being seen to be loved, and trusted. Thomas’s title has not changed that, and her affairs have not, and nothing can. She wants to take the warmth of that feeling and wrap it up in a package and bestow it on James, James with his hungry eyes and the countless layers of his defences, James who never quite believes that she and Thomas are real.

Now that they are here, she finds that it is perhaps the first time they have been all three together in daylight. Usually it’s Thomas and James closed up in a study arguing each other into the ground, or the three of them at a late supper drinking wine and laughing until their stomachs hurt. There are the salons, of course, but those preclude intimacy by their very nature, even if the only outsiders there are Peter Ashe and the few men he’s managed to lure back.

“Penny for your thoughts,” says Thomas. He throws a strawberry at her and hits her in the centre of her forehead.

She scrabbles about on their blanket for it, then throws it back at him. “You absolute _child,_ ” she says affectionately.

Propped up against a tree, sated from their picnic, James opens one eye to see what the noise is about. “What did he do?”

“Threw a strawberry at me!” Miranda crawls over to Thomas and plucks the strawberry from the folds of his jacket, then holds it up for James to inspect.

James bursts out laughing, and the Hamiltons both still at the sound. _Yes,_ Miranda thinks. She is hungry for his unguarded joy. Yes, yes, yes, this is what she wanted.

“Do I need to call him out for you, my lady?” James poses the question in a tone half-playful and half-shy, as if he wants to participate in the joke but fears overstepping his bounds. Miranda finds it almost unbearably endearing.

Thomas snakes a long arm around Miranda’s waist and pulls her back against him so that he can eat the strawberry from her fingers. “I’m afraid I’ve destroyed the evidence. And I also beg your pardon, darling.” To James he adds, “Hedging in my bets again.”

This is, evidently, a private joke between him and James, because James shuts his eyes and puts his head back against the tree, so that they can’t see his face. Miranda snuggles against Thomas’s shoulder. He is good at putting James at ease—better than she is, although in fairness she is usually trying to _un_ settle James. Thomas brings his free arm up to curl around Miranda’s neck, fingers rubbing idly up and down the tendons. A distant flash of lightning tells her that they have not much longer to enjoy the picnic, but she feels so content. She wishes the world might pause and let them stay like this a few hours more.

Presently, Thomas says, “This was an excellent idea.”

James opens his eyes again, and they catch on Thomas’s hand against Miranda’s skin. He wets his lips and says, “Yes.”

Thomas loves to touch and be touched, and it drives James wild. In the ordinary course of things, James is not much interested in touch without sexual intent, but moments like this rouse him visibly, turn him jittery and unsteady and desirous. Deliberately, Miranda arches her back, tilting her head against Thomas’s shoulder. He kisses her temple and says, very fondly, “I take it you agree.”

“Mmmm,” says Miranda. A muscle jerks in James’s jaw. She can’t understand how Thomas doesn’t see it.

Drumming his first two fingers against his knee, James says, “Shall we go back?”

“Back?”

Miranda tilts her head back, trying to see Thomas’s face. She knows that she is teasing James, but she doesn’t think Thomas is. His hand has shifted slightly, so that his thumb rubs over her pulse point. It feels lovely. The sensation of it, and Thomas’s warmth at her back, and especially the fact that she can see it winding James tighter and tighter.

She makes a languid, sulky noise. “But I’m terribly comfortable here. If we go home, I shall have to pay a call on Lady Cowper. I prefer to stay,” and she nuzzles into Thomas’s neck.

“What a cat you are today, Miri.”

“My lady,” James says at the same time, a little strangled.

She likes doing this to James during sex, too. Coming from the Navy, he has been accustomed to fast, desperate sucking and fucking, in back alleys and up against walls damp with fog. She likes to make him go slow. She likes the way he kisses her while she drags it out and out; when he shuts his eyes and lets her do what she wants to him; the sharp edges of his voice when he says _please_ and _that, God, yes._

“Lieutenant?” she says innocently.

James gives her a look that says he knows exactly what she’s doing, and she cannot prevent the smile that breaks across her face. Sometimes she is troubled by her own luck. Thomas, and then James.

Taking pity on him, she detaches herself from Thomas to sip her tea, which has cooled. They talk of Cervantes, as James has been reading him on his own, and discover that it is difficult to talk about a book when the conversers have read it in two different languages. When the topic of _Don Quixote_ is exhausted, she makes Thomas tell them about the letter he received from his father two days ago. Better, she thinks, to speak of it when it’s daylight and they are all together.

“It’s only what you imagine. Imprecations about our motives. He copied out some bits of letters he’s received—”

“He claims he’s received,” Miranda puts in.

“—from various parties. Well, yes, but I don’t think he would have gone to the trouble of making them up. My father is many things but he’s not a liar.”

When they were first engaged, Thomas’s father offered Miranda a certain sum of money if she would release Thomas from the engagement and disappear. She wonders what he would have told Thomas, if she had taken it. She does not think it likely that he would have told the truth—or if he did, then it would arise from a desire to see Thomas hurt, not from any devotion to veracity.

She does not say this to Thomas.

James, hard-eyed, says, “Fuck him.”

Because of the ominous sky, the Mall is less crowded than it would ordinarily be, but it is not nearly empty enough for this sort of language. A young man in a blue coat casts them a scandalized glance and ushers his sister several feet farther away.

“I prefer not,” says Miranda, sotto voce.

James laughs, but Thomas doesn’t. He is still feeling the pinch of his father’s disapproval. Miranda does not have to read the letter to guess what Thomas has edited out of his account. Alfred Hamilton calls her a whore every time he sees her, and the things he says of and to Thomas are worse. Likely he insulted James in his letter, too, and _that_ thought makes her shiver as if somebody has walked over her grave.

“Peter is seeing substantial progress towards the plans we’ve outlined.” James is overeager in that way he has when Thomas is unhappy, frantic to hasten Thomas back into good cheer. “We all are. I don’t wonder he’s resorted to telling you lies.”

“Only the other day,” Miranda offers, “Lady Brunswick told me that the Societies for Reformation are preparing a sermon to be published in condemnation of the government for promoting drunkenness, lewdness, and popery. Evidently they might forgive the pirates the homicides, but not the whoring.”

Blue eyes distant, Thomas only nods.

Miranda tries again. “It’s being talked of as an inevitability.”

“Not by my father.”

Across their blanket, James and Miranda’s eyes meet, and she can see her own fury reflected back at her. Because she cannot wring Alfred Hamilton’s neck, she catches Thomas’s hand and laces her fingers through his. “I love you,” she says fiercely. “He is not going to win this. Do you hear me? He is _not. We_ are going to win.”

Thomas produces a wan, unconvinced smile. Before Miranda can work out a way to rescue the moment, rain begins to spit out of the sky. They have to run for the carriage, the footmen coming behind with all of their things. The carriage is not even moving when James draws the curtains shut and kisses Thomas hard.

“Fuck him,” he says. He kisses down the line of Thomas’s jaw, heedless of Miranda’s presence. “Fuck him, and fuck his ideas, and fuck his letters. Send for him to come to London so I can say it to his face.”

“Again?” Thomas sounds lighter as he draws back from James. “Thank you, but I’d rather preserve the peace of our own society.”

“Your wife gives me no peace,” James says darkly.

Miranda laughs aloud. “You jealous infant. When you know perfectly well you have us both wound round your finger.”

James says, “Ha!” but he smiles at them both, one of his rare uncalculated smiles.

“Jealous?” says Thomas, glancing from one to the other.

Miranda adores him. She aches with it. “The lieutenant wants you to touch him the way you touch me, darling, out in the park where everyone can see. He wants them all to know that he’s yours. Ours.”

Thomas turns surprised eyes on James, and James bites his lip, caught out.

Miranda will pay her call on Lady Cowper, and when she goes home she will find James and Thomas half-naked in bed, as Thomas reads aloud in his lovely, lordly voice. She will climb in beside James and rest her head against his bare shoulder as long as he will allow it, because he _is_ hers and she likes to show him that he is. Thomas will carry on reading to them, and perhaps they will have dinner brought up and left outside the door for when they fancy it, and oh, she will have everything, everything, everything that she ever wanted.

She feels sorry for all the people in the world who aren’t them.


	10. Chapter 10

Miranda’s heart jolted when the proprietor at Tarver’s handed her a letter, and it ran rabbit-quick when she saw the name _Ashbourne._ But Alfred Hamilton was dead, of course, and the name of Ashbourne no longer belonged to him. In lieu of heirs, the title had passed on to his younger brother, Thomas’s much-beloved uncle Benedict. Miranda used to be fond of him, though not fond enough to write him letters after Thomas—

She cracked the seal.

_My dear Lady Wallingford, for so it comes natural to style you, though an Age stands between our last Correspondence and this. It gives me greater Joy than I can tell you, to hear that you still think of Thomas, for whatever else may have befallen you both, I can never doubt your Love for him, nor his for you._

_Your Inquiry about his burial likewise does you Credit, but I fear that I have no Answer. It came very Ill to me to know that the Path chosen by my Nephew’s Father must have so weighd upon him, as to quicken thoughts of Self-Murder in his Mind. My Heart would be much gladdened, to know that there had been some error, as to the Manner of his Death, and you may count upon my humble Purse to make good any Claim that should arise in your Efforts to discover that he did not commit a Sin of that Kind, which the Governors at the Madhouse said of him._

_Having so cast us both into Grief, in remembrance of the One we have lost, I hope you will write back to an Old Man who remembers you with Fondness, and say a little of your Life since our last Meeting. My own has been very Dull without Thomas, and I have small Hope that the Adventures of an Old Man will interest a Lady, who has travelled the World as you have done. But write when you can, and think fondly of your own Uncle_

_Ashbourne_

In other words, Benedict did not believe in the slightest Alfred Hamilton’s story of what had happened between Miranda and Thomas all those years ago; and he was willing to bribe anyone it was necessary to bribe, to see Thomas decently re-buried. Miranda folded the letter very small and put it inside her bodice. She wore it next to her heart for nearly a week before—nervous of some danger she could not quite name—she put it into the fire.


	11. Chapter 11

Thomas asks Miranda to marry him when she is seventeen and he is fifteen. She says no because he is a little boy and she is finally beginning to be old enough to spend her days with men. Being Thomas, he takes it with equanimity. “I begin to suspect I couldn’t give you children, anyway,” he says.

“Women give children to men,” says Miranda haughtily.

When she is nineteen and Thomas has just turned eighteen, she allows a man to behave familiarly with her. He is the tutor her father engaged to teach her Spanish, because she happened to mention, untruthfully, that Thomas’s father thought it right for ladies to know Spanish as well as French. He sometimes watches her under his eyelashes in a way that makes a thrill run through her when she catches him at it. Knowing almost nothing of flirtation, she parrots what he does: watches him surreptitiously, lets him catch her, then looks away smiling. She is a little startled by how quickly her methods bear fruit, for he puts a hand first on her wrist, then her leg.

She does not have a very clear idea, when she begins, of what this will entail, or what she hopes to achieve by permitting the liberty. She knows that she does not want to stumble into marrying Thomas just because enough people have said enough times that she is to marry him.

(Spanish is very like Latin, which she has studied with Thomas. It does not require her full attention.)

Very quickly she learns that she is quite as full of warm wet lusts as her father’s sermons have adjured her to believe. By and by, Mr Wilson shocks her by putting his mouth at her breast, and she shocks herself by shuddering into his touch. She intended to be quite in control of the exercise, but Mr Wilson’s hands slip deftly under her skirts— _both_ of them, skirt and petticoat!—and she knows both that he must stop and that she wants him never to stop.

With nobody else to ask, she writes to Thomas. _Tetigistine aliquem mulierem?_ Have you ever touched a woman? She hopes he will understand what she means by _touch,_ as she dares not be more explicit. Usually a very punctual correspondent, Thomas does not answer for several weeks, long enough for her to become morbidly certain that he thinks ill of her for asking the question. Maybe he even divines the reason for her asking it, and she cannot repress a squirming sense of shame at having needed to ask.

At their next lesson, Mr Wilson removes his glove to touch the skin of her shoulder. She asks him coldly what he is about, and he stammers stupidly and withdraws.

“I believe I have learned all I can from Mr Wilson,” she tells her father that evening. “I find that I do very well when Lord Wallingford writes to me in Spanish.”

Her father does not attempt to disguise his relief. He has gone without his own small luxuries in order to pay Mr Wilson—an investment in her presumed eventual marriage. _I wonder if you love me at all,_ Miranda thinks. Her sisters would never pose such a question. It is only because she knows Thomas that she is capable of thinking the thought, Thomas who pushes open her small world into vast infinity.

She hopes that Thomas does not think ill of her.

Stoutly, her father says, “Are you sure, my dear?” because he will see her married to Thomas if he has to starve the other girls to do it.

“Quite sure.”

But when she lies in bed, she thinks of Mr Wilson’s forefinger, playing with the upper hem of her sensible wool stocking, and she feels a hot trickle of unfinished want at the very centre of her. She presses her thighs together. It would have taken very little, when he touched her, to ruin herself then and there. Not just herself, but all her family’s hopes, every penny they have spent to make the most of her chances with Thomas. She finds it curious and frightening to know how little it would have taken. All her life she has felt sceptical of her father’s dire warnings about the temptations of the flesh. If they are so ruinous to one’s spirit, why would anyone choose the path of sin? She never expected to attain the age of majority and find all the warnings true.

Mr Wilson becomes a distant memory, but Miranda can still feel the hot stirrings of want she experienced when he touched her.

She does, finally, receive a letter back from Thomas. It says only, “ _Numquam._ ” Never.

* * *

That autumn, Thomas’s mother dies. The Dowager Lady Shaftesbury, whose son is a friend and neighbour of Thomas’s, invites Miranda to stay at St Giles House so that she can attend the funeral, which is such a kindness to Thomas that Miranda cries over the letter. Her father is pleased. She overhears him telling her mother that it does the girl credit to see her so attached to the earl’s late wife. If it would not have hurt Thomas to hear, she would have told him that. Lately Thomas has been very stern about the hypocrisy of the clergy, forever offering to send her books that her father would certainly burn if he found them in his house.

Though nobody has said so, Miranda presumes that one of Lady Ashbourne’s troubled, painful, unsuccessful pregnancies has finally killed her. The idea fills her with an unnameable fear. All through the journey to Dorset, she cannot avoid the feeling that she is riding to her doom, as if it is she and not Thomas’s mother who will be wrapped up tight in a woollen shroud and laid to rest under the cold eyes of a man who hates her. When they reach St Giles House, and she sees Thomas waiting to meet her coach, she almost sobs with relief. He hands her down from the coach, and she still has a foot on the lowest step when she flings herself into his arms.

“Thank you for coming.” He smells like cold air and wood smoke, and he embraces her so tightly that she can feel every shuddering breath he takes.

Lord Shaftesbury invites Thomas to dine, along with his father and his uncle, Mr Hamilton, the one Miranda met all those years ago at the Belle Savage. It is a kind attention, Miranda tells herself, but she dearly wishes that he had only asked Thomas. She has not met Lord Ashbourne before and hopes she will never have to meet him again. When she curtsies to him and his brother, he curls his lip and turns away from her. Miranda looks to see what Thomas will make of this bit of rudeness, but Thomas does not see it. His face is dead white, even his lips washed clean of colour, and he walks at a disjointed lurch, as if he is hung at the end of strings managed by a not-very-skilled puppeteer.

Over the first course, Lord Ashbourne deigns to notice Miranda by saying, “I trust your journey from Covent Garden was comfortable.”

She keeps her eyes cast down. “Yes. My lord is kind to inquire.”

He is not kind to inquire. He is making a point of her unfashionable address. Miranda wonders if he realizes that he has given away how threatening he finds Thomas’s affection for her. Ordinarily he takes no notice at all of Thomas’s friends and interests.

“Evidently my son could not bear up under his grief without a curate’s daughter to—” Lord Ashbourne pauses. “—solace him.”

Mr Hamilton’s knife rattles in his plate, and Miranda feels the colour rise in her cheeks. Thomas’s eyes are a miserable glaze, and she can see that he hasn’t heard a word.

“Dear Thomas is fortunate to have a friend like Miss Castell,” says the dowager countess, endeavouring to save the moment. “As the Scripture says, the Lord will have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. I think that Miss Castell—”

Thomas says, suddenly and too loud, “You are very kind to ask us here, Shaftesbury.”

An uncomfortable silence falls.

Lord Ashbourne breaks it. “My son is importunate. Lady Shaftesbury, I hope you will forgive—”

“There is nothing to forgive.” Lady Shaftesbury looks to her son for assistance.

“Certainly not,” says Lord Shaftesbury. “If we are able to provide the smallest comfort in this dark time—any solace, as you say, Lord Ashbourne—then it is our duty and pleasure to do so.”

Miranda is grateful to her hosts for their kindness. She cannot look away from Thomas, with his hollowed-out face and dark shadows under his eyes. In all the years they have been friends, she has never seen him look so fragile, as if a single sharp tap might send him flying into pieces. She wants to get him away from his father; she is startled by how protective she feels.

But she has no opportunity to speak to him. Lord Ashbourne dominates the conversation with talk of the Mughal Emperor’s recent imprisonment of the East India Company traders; the torments to which the Red Sea men put the Mohametans aboard the Mughal ship _Gunsway_ before killing them; and the wisdom of his own investments in the West Indies, where there are no native rulers to give trouble. Lord Shaftesbury, by Thomas’s account the gentlest of souls, is visibly astonished by the choice of subject and endeavours twice to change it, but Lord Ashbourne won’t be deterred. Even Miranda—who knows from Thomas how little regard his father had for his mother—is a little shocked that he would speak in such a way at such a time. Imagine being so certain of one’s place in the world as that: not even to make a show of grief for losing one’s own wife.

After dinner, Thomas asks his father if he may stay the night at St Giles House. The asking of the question seems to exhaust him. “I have been finding it very difficult,” he says, “to…” but his sentence trails off, and he appears to forget that he began one at all. Miranda’s heart aches for him. She does not know how to bear the injustice of seeing Thomas, _her_ Thomas, beg for a tiny mercy from a man like Alfred Hamilton.

“We should be happy,” begins Lord Shaftesbury.

“Certainly not,” says Thomas’s father. “If my son wishes to make a fool of himself over—” He nods towards Miranda. “—the likes of this chit, then he can damned well do it after his mother is decently put into the ground.”

Thomas’s whole body flinches. His uncle says, reproachfully, “Alfie.”

Miranda casts him a defiant glance and marches up to Thomas and puts her arms around him. She hears Lord Ashbourne’s angry huff, and Mr Hamilton’s “I say!” But she is here for Thomas, not for them, and what, after all, can they do to her? Thomas stifles a painful noise against her shoulder. He has grown very tall these recent years. For so long she was taller than he was, and then they were much of a height, but now she has to go up on the tips of her toes to hold him.

Daringly, she whispers in his ear, “To hell with your father,” and she thinks that he almost laughs.

* * *

At the funeral everyone keeps to their lines. Miranda realizes how stupid she was to think that she might hold Thomas’s hand during the service, or at the gravesite. She suspects that if she were not the guest of the dowager countess, she would have been made to stand with the servants. As it is, and despite the careful kindness of Lady Shaftesbury, she feels bitterly self-conscious of her shabby dress, which she had thought so fine in London.

Once or twice, she feels the chilly weight of Lord Ashbourne’s eyes on her, and she meets his gaze with solid defiance. _You killed her,_ she thinks, and she hopes the thought shows on her face. All to gain an heir, when the son he has is already perfect.

* * *

Two days after the funeral, on Miranda’s last day in Dorset, she finally sees Thomas again. She is curled up on the window seat in Lord Shaftesbury’s library—an attitude she has picked up from Thomas, who is prone to hiding himself behind curtains—when Thomas appears at the door of the room, hat in hand. He says her name in the way that is particular to him: startled by its aptness, _Miranda,_ as if she is indeed a thing to be wondered at. It is one of her favourite things about him.

“What are you doing here?” she stage-whispers, untangling her feet from her dress so that she can run to him. She is so eager that she nearly upsets the bust of Sir Christopher Marlowe that sits atop a low pillar near one of the chairs, and Thomas puts up a hand to save it. “Does your father know that you—”

“I don’t want to talk about my father,” says Thomas.

Tentative, Miranda touches his hand. “You look better.”

“I—” His eyes fill with tears. “I _knew_ that she would—so I don’t know why I—”

Miranda embraces him, because there isn’t anything else she can do. Thomas folds up around her, and they sink to the floor like that, wrapped in each other’s arms. She thinks he might be crying, but if he is, it’s absolutely silent. She is angry with such an intensity that it should set them both ablaze, because Thomas’s father has taught him to cry without making a sound, and because she—the sixth of seven children born to the curate of an unfashionable London parish—has no power to save him. She can only be a safe harbour for the stolen moments that Thomas is able to stay.

When Thomas finally pulls away, his eyes are bloodshot, his cheeks wet. He has clenched his hands into fists. “I need to ask you. Or tell you, I suppose. Or ask you. I want to know what you—I did not give you a good reply, when—” He gathers himself. “What you asked when you wrote to me, about women, and I said never—”

Lord Ashbourne’s nastiness has worn Miranda down. Shame coils at the base of her neck, and she tugs away from Thomas.

“No,” Thomas says, “wait, listen. Men are designed—you see, men are designed to live in harmony with themselves and their fellow man—or woman, and not to be forced to ends that would not be conducive to a harmonious life. Do you see? My father always said that it was my mother’s—” His voice skips, but his face has set into determined lines, and he talks faster. “—duty to give him sons, although there was no natural affection between them. He made her…”

They are both aware that Thomas is treading near subjects it is not polite to discuss with a lady. Miranda tries to help. “There were children that died unborn.”

“Yes, but—” Thomas gazes imploringly at Miranda. “Never mind them; I am talking about her. She thought it her place to be so unhappy, and to suffer so much, in pursuit of a duty to which her, her nature was not suited. Do you understand what I mean?”

Miranda licks her lips, trying to be courageous enough to ask what she wants to ask, about men, and women. Before she has gotten there, Thomas rushes on.

“And what I think—I have been thinking on it ever since I got your letter. I think our truest duty must be to, to look within ourselves, and to find what we, how best we can find harmony in our own lives, even if— Even if it is a different thing than the thing that would give harmony to the life of another man. If we look within ourselves, and deal with each other honestly, and find what best fits us.”

She is closer to being able to say it. “I let Mr Wilson take certain liberties.” The words feel like fire on her tongue, and her hand drifts to her breast, where Mr Wilson had kissed her.

With betraying eagerness, Thomas says, “And you felt nothing. That’s what you—” He sees his mistake in her face. “No, tell me.”

“It was—” Miranda is near tears. “—very pleasant.” She buries her face in her hands. It is not supposed to be pleasant, it is not supposed to make her want more. She has heard her mother counselling wives-to-be in her father’s parish. It is supposed to be a duty. Thomas touches her wrist, and she says, “Don’t, _please,_ I know that I oughtn’t have—”

“Wait, but listen,” says Thomas. “Listen. Miri. At Eton, there are boys who, the boys at Eton sometimes— I don’t know how to say it, before a lady. The boys take, take liberties with each other, the way we might— Don’t look like that. Oh, God, please don’t look like that.”

Tears burned away by shock, Miranda tries to arrange her face differently. She knows what the Bible says about men who lie with other men. What her father would say. But then she knows what her father would say about her, if he knew what she had let Mr Wilson do to her, and the way she pressed her legs together in bed that night, to feel again the thrill of desire. Very quietly she says, “Go on?”

For a moment, she thinks that Thomas will refuse to go on—make a joke of it, or tell her not to worry, and then excuse himself from her presence. He does that, she knows. When she is hurt, she wants to do damage; but when Thomas is hurt, he simply withdraws. She takes one of his hands, insinuates her fingers into his until he unclenches his fist to make space for her. “Tell me,” she says.

Thomas looks unhappy and determined. “Everyone says that you grow out of it.”

“Oh.” She has questions, but she can see that Thomas has wound himself up to bravery, just as she did, and he has not reached the difficult part yet.

“I don’t think I do grow out of it.” Thomas’s blue, clear eyes search hers, and Miranda tries very hard not to look like whatever he fears from her. “I do not think that God suited me for marriage in the—in the way that my father imagined a marriage must be. The same way that He did not suit my mother for childbearing. Can you understand?”

Yes. Yes, yes. Miranda’s eyes fill up with tears at how well she understands.

“I think that when a man, when a _person_ runs against their own nature, then they put themselves out of harmony with themselves, and the world.” Thomas sounds breathless. His grip on her hand is almost tight enough, now, to hurt. “I have tried, and I cannot see that God would make us in one way and then desire us to be something different. I don’t think that’s right. I think it must be a question of knowing oneself, and then—tuning oneself into harmony in the world however one can manage it.”

They are both crying. Miranda isn’t sure why. Nobody has ever told her before that she needn’t be the thing her father wants of her, the chaste and dutiful daughter, later the obedient wife and mother. Nobody has ever looked into her eyes and told her to know herself—nobody before this boy who has put both his life in her hands and thinks her a wonder.

“Do you understand?” Thomas asks, again.

Miranda says, “I do.”


	12. Chapter 12

Before Eleanor Guthrie could sail to Philadelphia to beg money from her wealthy relatives, Peter invited her to dine with them, a necessity that he clearly wished he could dispense with. “I know you won’t like to sit at table with her,” he said to Miranda, over breakfast, “but if you will be good enough to tolerate her presence only for an evening, it will do us a deal of good.”

James caught Miranda’s eye, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “Are you fearful of your reputation?” she said, “if you dine with the pirate queen of Nassau?”

“Of yours.” Sensing he was being teased, Peter spoke crisply. “There are things that James and I must discuss with her, before her departure, and it simply would not be appropriate for her to receive me in her own lodgings, even with a chaperone.”

“Ah,” said Miranda. “It’s your virtue, then, of which you’re fearful?”

James snorted. Peter shot them both an unloving look and excused himself on the pretext of discussing the evening meal with his staff. When he had gone, Miranda raised her eyebrows at James.

“He wants to make sure she knows whose interests she’s serving,” said James.

“Yes, I gathered that.” Miranda took a bite of her pancakes (Cook had done a fairly good quire of paper) and waited. With James, there was always more.

“The _Urca_ gold,” James said, and interrupted himself to add, “Peter doesn’t know this,” as if Miranda were likely to run to Peter with any news. “Before Hornigold took Miss Guthrie, she received intelligence that Captain Rackham—you wouldn’t have met him—”

The name was familiar. “Who’s his quartermaster?”

“Some fool or other. Rackham was Charles Vane’s quartermaster, for some time. His partner’s a woman, I’ve mentioned them.”

Miranda clicked her fingers. “Yes, right. Anne something. So: Miss Guthrie received intelligence that Captain Rackham did what?”

“He emptied out the ship’s hold, everything, filled her up with fresh water, and was making ready to set sail.” James watched the realization settle into her. He rested one hand on the table, his ring finger drumming against the tablecloth. “Miss Guthrie says that she put a stop to it. But if Rackham gets the gold, and returns with it to Nassau before we’re able to mount our expedition—”

“ _If_ you’re able to mount your expedition,” Miranda put in.

James narrowed his eyes. “We are making good progress.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You don’t listen to me when I try to tell you what it means,” James snapped.

Well. That was true enough. She wanted to protest that she had enough to manage her own unhappiness, without adding James’s to it, but of course James rebelled against the suggestion that she might feel any responsibility for him. “I only mean that it’s an uphill battle,” she said, and took another bite of her breakfast, to show that she did not intend to continue arguing.

James gave her a long, measured look to indicate that he knew she was conciliating him, then accepted the overture. “Yes. We’ve secured some funding, though not nearly the kind of money Miss Guthrie could bring us. The merchant I told you about, Rogers, wants to fund a great deal of it out of his own pocket, but I don’t like the notion.”

“A great many things that aren’t in your control,” said Miranda.

“Yes. Miss Guthrie hired someone to kill Rackham, but he’s slippery. She was taken before her man could report back to her.”

The word _taken_ sent a superstitious chill through her. She set down her spoon and knife, carefully, and folded her hands in her lap. “And Spain?”

James waved a hand to show that his mouth was full. They had been talking about the _Urca_ gold for so long now that he had begun to make a joke of her fear of Spain. At Nassau, the farmers spoke in hushed voices of the Spanish raids during the war, and mothers warned their children not to play in the wreckage of houses the Spanish had burned.

He washed down his mouthful with a swig of beer. “We haven’t heard anything, no. The rest of the fleet ought to have left Havana by now, and if it reaches Madrid before news of the wreck does, it’s possible they’ll write off the loss of the _Urca._ It’s possible they won’t hear of the wreck at all, if none of the Spaniards aboard the _Urca_ made it to civilization to report the loss. It’s possible the gold will lie on that beach until the sand covers it over.”

“It’s possible,” Miranda repeated.

The fire guttered, and they both looked over at it, but it resumed its burning. A complicated, wistful look flickered across James’s face. “The wind here is different.”

Miranda laughed. “What?”

“In Nassau, when the wind blew like that, it meant a storm. But here… I don’t know.”

She knew what he meant. In the hours before a tempest, the wind could be gentle, and mercifully cool. One grew to know the difference between the wind that came off the sea and the breeze that warned of an oncoming storm. “Do you miss it?” she asked.  
_  
_ James gave her a rueful smile. After a moment he nodded toward her pancakes and said, “Are those burned?”

“Hardly,” said Miranda. “If you put extra sauce on them, you won’t notice.”

* * *

After the third day, Miranda had stopped hoping that a letter would arrive for her at Tarver’s, but she wanted to be out of the house, so she continued to go and ask. They were used to her by now, the staff and the men who were there at nine in the morning, and they hardly gave her a second glance. When she asked if there were any letters for her, the coffeeman no longer pretended that he didn’t know her name. He tipped his hat to her and disappeared into the back of the shop before she had quite registered that he had said, “Yes, ma’am.”

 _It’s Benedict again,_ Miranda told herself. Her knees felt like water, and she sat down, trying to keep her breathing under control. It had to be Benedict, and not— _He’s lonely, and he’s old, and he hasn’t anything else to do,_ she thought. She was stricken by guilt for not having written him back yet, when he had been so kind.

But the coffeeman set down a letter addressed, in a hand she didn’t recognize, to Mrs James McGraw. Her hands were shaking so much she could hardly crack the seal. She had a sudden memory—maybe a false one—of opening another letter, years and years ago. Her heartbeat had pounded out _he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone_ and she had never, James had never, they had never recovered from it, _she_ had not, they had not lived again; they had only survived.

She had asked for this. It had nothing to do with her feelings. What mattered was Thomas.

 _It is very diverting, and only costs a penny for the poor-box and another for the porter.  
_  
(When they were children, Thomas used to stuff his pocket money into the poor-box at Miranda’s father’s church. Pennies, shillings, crumpled-up notes.)

Her eyes fell on the words _We regret,_ and a high thin noise came out of her. He used to call her _dear heart_ ; he used to give her the sweet apples and keep the tart ones for himself. She put a hand over her mouth and bit the fleshy skin below her fingers until she tasted blood.

 _We regret,_ but what else had she expected? Of course she would not be allowed this one comfort. She had left Thomas behind, and she deserved _nothing._

The letter said: _We regret that we are unable to answer the question you put to us._

Her hand closed, convulsively, over the paper, and she remembered—

Please, no. Please, dear God.

(Thomas prayed morning and evening, and Miranda had grown up in a church, but it was James who knew the Bible best, and could quote it chapter and verse.

“Wasn’t your father a curate?” he teased Miranda once, when he was a little drunk, and Thomas laughed so hard he almost choked on his wine.

“Aren’t you a guest in my house?” she retorted, laughing too. 

Thomas dragged himself under control and looked at James with his heart in his eyes and said, “You needn’t be, you know.”)

She smoothed out the letter, the letter she had hoped for. A date jumped out at her from the page, 18 October 1708, and she drew in a shuddery, agonized breath because that must be the day that he—

(When she asked James if they might have a funeral, something that would be private and truthful and particular to Thomas, he looked as if he had been stabbed in the gut. So there had been nothing to mark his passing, and she could not mark it in the years that followed because until now she had not known the day.)

18 October 1708. October. He loved the autumn, as the days turned colder and they began to need fires in every room. He used to stand at the mantels to talk, and sometimes he got so interested in what she was saying that he did not pay attention and his clothes came away singed.

She could not look back down at the letter. She could not bear to know more, when the day all on its own was enough to tear her to pieces. What had she been doing in October of that year? She couldn’t remember. By 1708, Pastor Lambrick had arrived, and she had had his books to read, so perhaps she had been curled up in the front room, reading and reading and reading.

No, that couldn’t be right. She was misremembering the years. Thomas was dead before Pastor Lambrick ever came to Nassau, because she remembered telling him that she was a widow.

(“You needn’t be, you know,” Thomas said to James, that once.)

Muddled, she counted out the years in her head. They had come to Nassau in 1706. James bought her the spinet that year, but it was broken. The new spinet came the next year, and by that time Thomas had died.

(“You needn’t be, you know,” he said to James, and James looked up at him with unbearable, unguarded longing, and she knew—

Oh, God, but if she had known, then why had she not held him back from their doom, why had she let him walk unknowing down that crooked three-path’d way?)

The door of the coffeehouse slammed, and Miranda jumped.

The letter was still there, the table, the world. Without meaning to, she had moved one of her hands to cover up the salutation. _Mrs McGraw,_ that ugly lie. The letter said, _set down in Hospital records in the week of 18 October 1708,_ which was not possible because Thomas had died in 1707.

A mistake, then.

A mistake in the writing.

She went back a few lines.

_—into the care of Lord Peter Ashe, who was good enough to make arrangements for his continued Well-being._

But that was not possible. The date was not possible, and Lord Peter Ashe could not have had anything to do with it. It was nonsense from start to finish. It might as well have been written in Greek.

(What must he have thought, when nobody came? Had he waited to be saved? Had he ever laughed again? She always loved to make him laugh.)

_Report of his discharge is set down in Hospital records in the week of 18 October 1708._

Thomas had died in 1707. It was not possible that anything at all had happened to him in 1708, because by that time he was gone.

She began over again. She read the letter very slowly, forming each word with her lips to make sure that she missed nothing.

_Dear Mrs McGraw:_

_Thank you for your inquiry. We regret that we are unable to answer the question you put to us. We wonder if there has been a Misunderstanding as to Lord Wallingford’s time at the hospital. To ensure that the Board might most efficiently discharge its Obligations, it was agreed upon that incurable Madmen should be remanded into the custody of a more fitting Institution, directly our good Doctors felt assured that their Affliction might not be mended by the standard course of Treatment._

__(Thomas used to baby her terribly when she was ill. After the first few years of endeavouring to convince him that she was perfectly all right, she realized that he must be remembering his mother, with her fragile health.)  
_  
In Accordance with this Decision, Lord Wallingford was given in good spirits into the care of Lord Peter Ashe, who was kind enough to aid his father, Lord Ashbourne, in making arrangements for Lord Wallingford’s continued care._

_Report of his discharge is set down in Hospital records in the week of 18 October 1708._

The week of 18 October 1708. Who was _kind enough._

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t—

She _could not_ breathe.

Who was kind enough. _  
_  
At Christmas in 1707, she had thought Thomas dead by his own hand, and she had never recovered.

The letter said: _Report of his discharge is set down in Hospital records in the week of 18 October 1708._

“My lady?” said a voice at her shoulder; the coffeeman, she supposed.

Miranda startled, her hand closing again over the letter. “I’m fine,” she said automatically. Her eyes were hot with tears, and the paper was heavy under her fingers. She could see Thomas’s empty dead eyes, blood in the straw, paper-white skin; when she closed her eyes she could see it.

 _Miri, please. Promise me._ Only she in all the world should have had the right to touch him in death, to close his eyes forever, to touch the earth where his body had been laid to rest.

 _Report of his discharge is set down in Hospital records in the week of 18 October 1708,_ but he had died in 1707 and she was far away across an ocean too far away to know that last great agonizing intimacy of tending to his body of laying him to rest of lowering a black veil over her face to watch him being lowered into the ground she had nothing she deserved nothing and Thomas, Thomas, Thomas—

The governors of Bethlem might have mistaken the year, but their records could not say _discharged_ when the truth was _dead,_ and if Thomas had been discharged alive, then—

Then—

Grief was an ocean in which she sometimes floated and sometimes drowned. She thought it painful—there had been days, weeks in which she thought she might die of it—but, God, it was mercy itself compared to the lancing agony of hope.

* * *

She was not sure what she did with the rest of her day. James and Peter were out, as they often were, which meant that she did not have to make conversation with them and pretend that everything was normal. Peter had lied to them. He had assembled pen and ink and paper and written to them the lie that had broken Miranda as thoroughly as a china plate shattered on cobblestones. Now he was James’s ally, and he had still not told them the truth.

Or was there some other explanation that Miranda was too dull to see? Could she have been mistaken about the year? Time passed so strangely in Nassau. But even if she mistook the date, she could not misremember the letter. She remembered the sentence, written in Peter’s handwriting, _I suppose he could not bear the privations at Bethlem,_ as clearly as if it had been branded into her skin. Even now, the thought of it made her feel ill. But that had been a lie. If Thomas was dead, it had not happened in Bethlem.

She knew almost at once that she could not tell James the truth. If he did not see in the letter the possibility that Thomas yet lived, she thought it might kill her. And if he did see it—well, she knew beyond doubt that it would kill him. Having hesitated the first time, he would not let a chance for action pass him by again. He would kill Peter Ashe and he would be hanged, and then she would be alone.

She did consider asking him if she might be excused from their dinner with Eleanor Guthrie, but she felt too tired and stupid to concoct a lie to explain the request. Too, she was tired of the way James looked at her if she complained about anything in London. Not even at her: through her.

Eleanor Guthrie arrived in a blue dress that had obviously not been made for her. Her hair was loose, which suggested her lady’s maid was either unable or unwilling to dress it properly. She looked weary, her eyes heavily shadowed, and Miranda felt keenly the injustice of what James was doing to her, sending her among wolves in the hope that they would recognize her as one of their own.

Peter, the bloody hypocrite, bowed over her hand, and Miranda wanted to pull his head back by the hair and slit his throat and feel the red sticky blood spill over her fingers. When James touched her elbow to lead her into dinner, she was so deep in the fantasy of Peter’s death that she almost hit him. He saw the impulse in her face and posture, and arched a quizzical eyebrow at her, which she ignored. They were not allies, she and James. Not in this. He had chosen that it would be so.

Over dinner, Peter issued stern reminders to Eleanor Guthrie as to the amount of money that would be required, interspersed with veiled threats of prison and perdition should she fail to acquire the necessary sum. Miranda took very small, precise bites of her scotch collops and did not participate in the conversation. The gravy was excellent, the steak done to a nicety. She wished that Cook had squeezed orange over it before sending it out. She wished that Peter were dead. She wished that she might tie him to a chair, wrists and ankles, and set James on him to find out the truth. _Where is Thomas?_ she would hiss at him, her face inches from his, while he bled and pleaded. _Tell me, or—_

That would be a lie. She would kill him whether he talked or not. She would revel in it.

James kicked her ankle, and she looked up. Her grip on her knife was so tight that it had indented the skin of her hand.

“Do you understand what will happen to you if you fail?” Peter barked at Eleanor.

Thomas had loved him. He had _loved_ Peter, sung his fucking praises to Miranda as a man of integrity and intelligence.

Miranda opened her fingers with some difficulty and set down her knife. “If she fails,” she said, “having received your assurance that nothing awaits her here but a gallows, I expect she will take a ship to any destination other than London, and your enemies will claim, with some justice, that you secured the pardon of a dangerous pirate boss and then unleashed her on the colonies with money in her pocket and a grudge against the Crown.”

James had been affecting a disinterested slouch, likely trying to avoid any further suggestion that he had a personal stake in Eleanor Guthrie’s well-being. He shook his head at Miranda very slightly.

 _Fuck you, James,_ Miranda thought.

“This doesn’t concern you, Miranda,” said Peter.

“It’s _Miranda_ now, is it?” she said coolly. “It was _my lady,_ last week.”

Eleanor glanced between them, clearly trying to find her footing in the conversation.

“James,” said Peter.

“Mm?”

Peter nodded at Miranda. James, who did not take kindly to any suggestion that he should control his woman, put up his eyebrows as if he had not understood. Miranda smiled demurely at them and ate a bite of neat’s tongue and broccoli.

Eleanor interjected. “I have every expectation that my grandfather will favour our venture, particularly with the promise that a reward will be placed on the head of the pirate who killed my father. And I have no intention of fleeing for the provinces, whatever happens. Nassau is England’s possession and a vital centre for trade. I am committed to seeing it put to rights in the hands of an honest English governor like Mr Rogers.”

She had James’s gift for lying without the smallest trace of shame. Miranda admired it. The truth about Peter and Thomas seemed to sit on the very tip of Miranda’s tongue, and it was all she could do not to scream it out.

“We all share that hope,” said Peter. He sounded wary, and his eyes were on Miranda.

Obviously they had intended her to be a prop in all of this, the matron whose presence made Eleanor’s possible. She had disorientated Peter by straying from her intended role. _I’ll do more than bewilder you,_ she thought, venomous.

James was watching Miranda, his face soft. He would have preferred that she stop antagonizing Peter, but he liked her fractious. Thomas, too. She wanted to tell him.

She wanted to tell him. She wanted to say, “Peter betrayed us; he betrayed Thomas.”

She said, “Of course that’s my hope, or I should not be here now.” When Peter’s face relaxed, she found she was not yet ready for him to feel that he was safe. “But that’s why it won’t do to mistrust our allies. Miss Guthrie—”

“I’m certain Miss Guthrie understands the importance of what we’re doing here,” said James.

Peter looked at Eleanor, who had just taken a bite of gooseberry fool and was now licking her spoon. Caught in the act, she put the spoon down hastily, and Peter smiled at her. “Yes, I do,” she said.

“Certainly you do,” said Peter encouragingly. “You must understand, Miss Guthrie, that the risks to all of us are considerable if your errand should fail.”

“Yes, my lord,” Eleanor said.

It was very nicely done, on Eleanor’s part: a dumb show of innocence and youth, by way of contrast to Miranda’s disruptive nagging. If Miranda were less accustomed to how James went about getting his own way, she might have been taken in as well. Peter, who did not rate women very highly as a species, was an excellent audience for it.

James was watching her, a worried crease between his eyebrows. If they had been alone, he would have pulled his chair closer, so that his shoulder would bump against hers while they ate. If they had been alone, she might have told him the truth.

That was her trouble, she thought, the reason that James got his own way while she gasped along in his wake. Like Eleanor Guthrie, he always knew the shape of the path between where he stood and what he wanted. If there was no path, he need only act as though one existed in order to find it, triumphantly, beneath his feet. James with his impossible desires, James who thought he could remake the world.

Because she wanted James to stop looking at her, she returned to her food.

James stopped looking at her.

When she knew him less well—that summer in London, then the first year in Nassau—he used to insist that he was not particularly clever, only that everyone else was stupid. “But you _are_ clever,” she said, and he cast her a smile and said, “But they _are_ stupid.”

Tonight was the first time she properly understood what he meant—and he was still wrong, just not in the way she used to think. It wasn’t a question of clever and stupid, but of who was paying attention. The men of Nassau presumed that nobody was paying them any attention, and they might live under that presumption because it was, nearly always, correct; only that _James_ was paying attention, storing up what he saw to be used later on. Peter did not think he was watched, and he did not think of Miranda as a person who could be watching.

 _But I am._ An ugly and slithering pleasure curled through her at the thought. _Oh, I am._


	13. Chapter 13

If James dies in faraway Nassau, they will have no standing to mourn him, though it will mean half their hearts torn away.

Thomas takes Miranda’s hand, and kisses the knuckle below her wedding ring. He holds the ring between thumb and forefinger and says, “I wish—”

“I know,” says Miranda.


	14. Chapter 14

On the sea journey to Nassau, Miranda learns the cruelty of which she is capable. They share a cabin—they do not say that they are married, but James gives his name as Hamilton—and the room is too small for kindness. That is the excuse Miranda gives herself, for the way she is with James, casting his mistakes in his face every chance she gets. In truth, she does not think there are quarters spacious enough to contain her rage over the life she has lost.

“Do you think I don’t miss him?” she spits at James. “Do you think you’re the only one who grieves him?”

“He isn’t dead,” James says. “You insisted that we leave him behind. _You_ did that. We could still go back.”

Miranda laughs. Her eldest sister, before she died of consumption, used to tell the little ones stories of wicked witches who laughed as they sent curses to prey upon the souls of naughty children. Miranda’s laugh sounds like that, now.

“Is something funny?” James grits out.

“Then go back,” says Miranda. “Go back, and see if you have the opportunity to tell Thomas that you disregarded his last request, his only request, before Lord Ashbourne has you strung up for the entertainment of all London. See if that brings you any peace.”

She turns away from him, because her own pain is already a greater burden than she can carry. She cannot take on James’s too. _Promise me you’ll take care of each other,_ Thomas told her. Miranda is not sure she will ever be capable of more than what she has already done, keeping James alive. Perhaps it would be more honest to say, keeping him breathing. She thinks she has already watched James die, the James that she and Thomas loved.

“We’ll finish what he began,” James tells her, one night when they are in amity. “I swear to you, I swear it.”

He isn’t swearing it to her. He’s swearing it through her, to Thomas in London, as if the thing Thomas had most cared about was the pirate problem in Nassau and not— Miranda’s fingers lace through James’s, and she squeezes as tight as she can.

When they reach New Providence Island, Miranda thinks at first that it is beautiful, the deep blue of the ocean giving way to greener colours closer to the shore, the sunshine that dazzles off the bare white sand. But as their ship draws into the harbour, there are more houses and more people, and Miranda can see the fort that looms over the island, and the black specks of cannon in their embrasures. She shudders and turns her back. There is little to see on the other side of the harbour, just a small spit of land empty of habitation, pinned in its place by scrubby, windblown trees.

The passengers are allowed to go ashore first. The mate helps Miranda into the boat, and his fingers brush her breast, which might have been an accident. Miranda doesn’t react. Right now, there is nothing James wants more than to do harm to somebody. It flashes across Miranda’s mind that if James hangs for murdering a ship’s mate, she can go back and apply to Peter for money and live out her days in Paris.

She hates herself for having the thought.

In the boat, James watches the shore with steady eyes, and Miranda tries to see what he sees, coming back to this place as a civilian. Men splash in the crystal blue of the water, unload crates, quarrel so loudly over a mistake one or the other of them has made that the sound—though not the sense—carries across the water to the boat. There are no women. Miranda wonders if James notices. When they are nearly at the dock, he looks back at her, expectant.

“O brave new world,” she says.

James flinches. She cannot say if she intended the words to hurt him. Without Thomas she is such a stranger to herself.

When they reach the pier, James puts a hand on Miranda’s waist, and she jerks away. “I can do it,” she snaps.

“You aren’t—” James begins, but he catches the eye of the oarsman and makes a face for public consumption, wry and hen-pecked. Miranda climbs onto the pier without James’s hand, her skirts wet at the hem and slapping against her ankles, a dragging weight that comes close to unbalancing her.

They take a room at an inn, where James leaves her to see what he can discover about taking a house. She has no idea how one goes about taking a house in such a place as this.

All through the long journey from London, every moment—nearly every moment—she has longed to be away from James, and now that she is, she finds herself near panic, her breath coming too fast and her chest thrumming. If he does not return— She has been vicious to him, even during sex she has not been kind, and if something happens to him, out there, on that beach, in these taverns, then she will be—

She does not know what she will be.

She remembers the way it felt when her father ordered her from his house. Looking back, she thinks that he might not have meant it to be forever. But she thought it was forever, and she could remember feeling this way then. The door of her father’s house closed behind her, final as death. The vastness of what was lost to her.

She does not know how to be this Miranda. She has been Miranda-with-Thomas nearly all the years of her life. That Miranda would not have stayed in a room like this. That Miranda was accustomed to her world of sufficiency.

The house James takes, atop a small hill, was attached to a sugar farm that had been raided by the Spanish. The farmer sold out the year after the raid, unable to recover from the loss. Miranda expects the place to show signs of past violence, but the former owner must have taken some pains about it: The only trace she ever finds is a chip in the frame of one of the doors that James says probably came from a bullet. Other than that, it’s serviceable after they air it out, and there are rooms besides their bedroom that she can go into and shut the door.

“Don’t wander about alone,” James tells her gruffly when he takes a horse into town to—whatever it is he intends to do. She trusts in his intention to turn pirate, and at the same time, cannot quite believe in it.

 _Don’t wander about alone,_ as if there is anything to do but wander. They were only able to bring a few books over from London, and all of them remind her painfully of Thomas. Instead of reading, she wanders about alone, down the hill, south to the ocean. She gets up very early, before dawn, and sits at the place where patchy grass gives way to sand. She likes to turn her back on the land—all its people and all its noises and everything she cannot have—and watch the cool, certain water as it laps against the shoreline.


	15. Chapter 15

Miranda copied out the letter from the Bethlem Governors, which took long enough that the coffeeman at Tarver’s asked her nervously if she intended to stay much longer, and sent the copy to Thomas’s uncle. Along with it she sent a letter of her own.

 _It seems that Lord Peter Ashe has much to answer for,_ she wrote, _but for the time being, I wish not to approach him on the subject directly, lest he endeavour to cloud our path._

She wrote nothing of the possibility that Thomas might be alive. Benedict Hamilton was able to think of it himself, if he were inclined to optimism. She would not be the one to give the old man false hope, when she could scarcely tolerate it herself. She could not bear to lose Thomas a second time; she had hardly been able to bear losing him the first.

The Bethlem Governors said that they had discharged Thomas to Peter Ashe’s custody—alive—in the fall of 1708. Which meant—

Nothing, she told herself sternly. _Nothing._

“Are you all right?” James asked her, at dinner. Even to her own ears, her _yes_ was unconvincing.

It meant nothing she could hope for, but it meant that he had not taken his life. At least that. His blood had not spilled onto filthy straw, and he had not been found by men in blue coats who cared nothing for the person he had been with her, the lord and the thinker and the man, before the spirit bled out of him alone, alone, alone.

Now that she knew what Peter had done, it made a terrible kind of sense. James had been well thought of in the Navy, and for his Admiral to throw him aside so easily—it had never sat well with her. Peter was the piece of it she hadn’t known. Peter had helped Lord Ashbourne destroy them, and Thomas had known. If not when it first happened, then certainly when he was remanded into Peter’s custody upon his release from Bedlam. Thomas must have looked Peter Ashe in the eye, and known him to be the instrument of their downfall.

She had felt this way before, when her maid wrote to her of Lord Ashbourne’s journey from England. Except then she had seen, very clearly, how she would be the death of Alfred Hamilton, and now she could not see any outcome that did not end with James’s death.

The _profit_ Peter must have made from them. The power he had had in Charles Town, which he used to hang pirates, men that James had known, some he had even sailed with. Peter’s fashionable house in London; the library at his country estate of which he was so proud. All of that, bought with their misery.

Hope felt like a physical thing inside her, too vast to be contained by the bounds of her skin. She kept catching herself against banisters, heaving in hungry gulps of air as if she had just broken the surface of the ocean. What she felt was too much; it could not stay inside her; it demanded that she find it a means of egress. Peter’s death would satisfy it a while, she thought, and then she unthought it, because that thought led her nowhere—or nowhere, at least, that was survivable.

 _Forgive me,_ she found herself thinking, five times a day, twenty times a day, a hundred. _Please God, please Thomas, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me._ If she had known. If James had known. Had Thomas ever regretted what he had told her, that day, when Alfred’s men came for him?

* * *

The letter that came back from Benedict was fatter than Miranda had expected, and when she cracked the seal and unfolded it, she saw why: He had enclosed a letter to his banker, requesting that he permit the bearer, The Right Honble. The Viscountess Wallingford, to draw upon his account in any amount she should require.

She wished there was a way to tell James what she had learned, without his realizing that Peter Ashe must have been involved. But Peter Ashe’s involvement was the crux of the problem, and the only source of the solution, and she thought it was possible—likely, even—that James would kill him. Her own anger was nearly incapacitating; if she could have killed Peter Ashe with her bare hands, she would have done it, but she couldn’t.

James could.

That thought—James could—was, at times, all-consuming. She thought of watching Peter’s face turned mottled purple as James choked the life out of him. She thought that she would like to be the last, merciless sight Peter Ashe ever saw.

But then, Thomas.

And then, James.

Instead of killing Peter, she memorized the household’s routines. The hours Peter kept, and the schedule on which the housemaids cleaned each room. She found out the timetables for the stagecoaches that went into the country, and she wrote a letter to Mary Ashe wishing her well and inquiring after Abigail. From Benedict’s bank, she withdrew the sum of forty pounds and hid it with the pearls, under a floorboard in their bedroom that James had pried loose. She would not be caught unprepared again, not ever again.

She made a quiet habit of writing letters in Peter’s study from ten to eleven in the morning. They were harmless letters to old acquaintances whose notice she was now beneath. Because she could not quite bear the lie, she did not write that she had remarried. It made no difference. The letters were for Peter’s eyes, or his servants’ eyes. When she had written to everyone she could think of, she began to keep a commonplace book, copying out speeches from the newspapers or unrevolutionary passages in books from Peter’s library.

* * *

After a week had gone by, and her heart no longer pounded with the fear of discovery, she found Peter’s account book and began searching through it. The letter from Bethlem said that Thomas was discharged to Peter’s care in October of 1708, so she began there. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but she realized that she wouldn’t know what ordinary looked like, so she went back a few months earlier, to get a sense of Peter’s spending habits.

He bought a prodigious number of books and a modest number of candles. That would have made Thomas laugh, in the fond and tolerant way he laughed at human foibles he didn’t share.

He gave generously, to causes in America and England. The Associates of Dr Thomas Bray. The Charitable Corporation for the Relief of Industrious Poor. St. Thomas’s Hospital. Miranda remembered some of the London charities that had been pet projects of Thomas’s. Well, that was only natural. Thomas and Peter had thought alike on so many subjects.

A door slammed somewhere in the house, and Miranda started, nearly upsetting her tea over Peter’s account book. Peter and James were shouting at each other, several rooms away. Carefully, she closed Peter’s accounts and put the book back in the drawer where she had found it. In her own commonplace book she copied out a passage from Whichcote’s _Aphorisms,_ feeling slightly spiteful as she wrote “Tis impossible for a man to be made Happy, by putting him into a Happy _Place;_ unless he be first in a Happy _State._ ” Only then did she go downstairs.

Peter and James were standing by the door, ignoring the butler who waited to take their coats, and Peter was as much out of control as Miranda had ever seen him. “Do you think this is a game?” he bellowed at James. “When I stake my reputation for you?”

“The room was too close,” said James, flat as dishwater.

Some motion of Miranda’s caught James’s eye, and he turned his head to look at her. When Peter turned and saw her too, he made a visible effort to collect himself. “Excuse me, Lady—er.”

“Is everything all right?” she said. How she wished she were Lady Wallingford still. Then she would have been in her own home, and she might have dismissed Peter from it. She crossed to James and put her arm through his. He was shaking minutely; from rage or some other emotion, she wasn’t sure.

“Yes,” said Peter.

“Yes?”

“Your husband,” Peter said, meaning it for a barb, “walked out in the middle of a meeting with an influential group of merchants, a meeting at which a representative of the Council of Trade and Plantations was to join us later in the afternoon.”

 _Did you kill my husband,_ Miranda thought. Her fingers clenched tight around James’s arm, and he brought his other hand to cover hers. His skin was cold. “How interesting,” she said. “Will you be staying? I am writing letters at present, but I should be happy to join you if you wish to take dinner at home.”

Peter took a step forward, and Miranda had to force herself not to shrink back. “Let me ask you the same thing, _Mrs McGraw._ Do you think this is a game? My reputation, my funds, my influence with the merchants, while you live here at my expense?”

Miranda thought of her pearls, and her forty pounds, and her letter from Benedict Hamilton. “Of course not,” she said, making her voice soft. She was good at getting people to like her. “Can anything be done about it today?”

“Captain Flint,” said Peter, “has proclaimed that he is finished for the day.” But he was responding to Miranda’s gentler tone. He had been raised for too many years to be courteous before a lady, and he had known Miranda as the wife of an earl’s son for nearly a decade.

Miranda noticed that James had, subtly, repositioned them, shifting his weight to put himself between her and Peter. He must have felt her flinch.

“James doesn’t look well,” she said.

“I’m perfectly well.”

“The climate in London has disagreed with me, and I think with James too, even if he’s too proud to own it. May I send for hot water to draw a bath?” She wanted to be away, to get James away.

Peter wanted to keep shouting at James, but his upbringing won out. “You must send for whatever you need, my lady,” he said, with a reasonable simulation of good grace. “I’ll arrange for dinner, and we can discuss it at greater length this evening.”

James was still shaking. In a moment, it would become noticeable. Miranda let go of his arm and extended a hand to Peter, though she would rather have swallowed an adder than let Peter touch her. “I hope that you know how grateful we are for your help.” Peter brushed his lips over her knuckles, which were bare, and she suppressed a shudder.

When they reached their rooms, Miranda rang for hot water. James took off his boots and seemed to forget what else might be required of him, staring stupidly into middle distance. Hands on her hips, Miranda watched him for a moment, tapping an index finger against her stomach. “Did something happen?” she asked.

James looked at her. It seemed to take a great effort for him to move his head. “The room was too close.”

Miranda put her hands on his shoulders and helped him to take his coat off. He cooperated mutely. “You’ve slept in the holds of ships inches from half your men.”

“A third of my men,” he said, trying for a joke.

She undid his ascot. “James.”

“Miranda.” He closed a hand around her wrist, his eyes searching her face. Carefully, because James could be vicious if he feared being seen as weak—even by her, even now—she stepped closer, between his legs, and let him rest his head against her. He was shaking. She rubbed her fingers against the base of his neck.

“We don’t have to do this.”

James pulled away. “Yes, we do. There isn’t another way to get what we want.”

“We—”

There was a knock at the door, and Miranda sighed. “Come,” she said.

The setting up of the bathtub was a nuisance, and the staff were irritated at having to do it. They all knew what James was, and Miranda too. They thought it beneath their dignity to boil water and fetch and carry for a man who killed good honest sailors for gold and a woman who had cuckolded her first husband. The water was too hot, and they poured their buckets into the tub without regard for where it splashed.

Ordinarily James would have found it funny. But he had stopped paying attention, his head hanging down and his hands braced against the bed as if he thought he might have to get up quickly and run. When Miranda said his name, and nodded at the filled tub, he blinked in surprise.

“Get undressed,” she said gently, “and I’ll lay down a sheet.”

He obeyed, mechanically, as Miranda shook out the linen sheet the housekeeper had brought and let it sink into the tub. In her periphery, she saw James moving slow and weary, and it struck her that he was getting older, and would die. She had never thought of such a thing before, loss by attrition. Loss by violence had felt inevitable.

While James settled into the tub, Miranda busied herself about the room, tidying up things that did not need to be tidied. Then, briskly, she said, “Lift your head” and put a pillow underneath it, so that he could lie back against the brim of the tub. She sat down next to it, comforted by the warmth of the tub and the warmth of the fire and James.

After a while, James opened his eyes and said, “That can’t be comfortable.”

Miranda leaned her head against the tub, her hair just brushing his bare shoulder. “What happened today?”

James sighed. “The room—”

“If you say again that the room was too close,” said Miranda, with a vehemence that surprised her, and must have surprised James, too, because a smile touched his lips very briefly.

“No. The room was close, but— I don’t know. The walls—” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What were they talking of?”

“I was talking.”

Miranda tried not to let impatience creep into her voice. “What were _you_ talking of?”

“Of my history.”

“Captain Flint’s?”

James swallowed hard. He tipped his head back and said, “Mine.”

The lies Peter had concocted for him, then. She felt ill.

(Once, long ago, she had whispered in James’s ear, “Does he fuck you like this?” and James had choked out something incoherent and spent inside her. Afterward he would not meet her eyes. She wanted to say that she had not meant to shame him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, and he fell asleep on his stomach with his face turned away.

James had left early the next morning, creeping out the back way like a tradesman, and Miranda swept into Thomas’s study and asked the question outright. Thomas had blushed, and stammered out something that was not exactly a no but certainly wasn’t a yes.

“Will you go carefully?” said Miranda. “When you…”

“Of course I—” Thomas had been indignant, and then stopped himself, regarding Miranda with such understanding that she blushed in turn. He waited, his eyes asking a question that Miranda had not, until that moment, asked herself.

She shrugged, embarrassed to be caught out.

Thomas did not have it in his nature to want to own what he loved. After almost a decade of marriage, Miranda knew that as well as she knew anything, but she had still been shaken by the easy generosity of the smile he gave her. “I’m glad,” Thomas had said. “He loves you too, I think. It’s easier for him.”

Easier, he meant, than loving Thomas.)

What kind of love was it that she bore James? To stand back in the shadows while he laid himself bare for the sake of the truth? She shook her head very slightly, to feel the skin of James’s arm against her cheek. “I don’t want this.”

“Would you like to go into the country while we—?”

“No.”

“Then—” James leaned his head back again and shut his eyes. “I can’t find a way to spare you. It’s a filthy business. We should never—” He cut himself off.

Suddenly and acutely, Miranda wanted him to follow the thought to its conclusion. She wanted to know that he thought of Thomas still; she wanted to hear Thomas’s name in his mouth. “Never what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.”

James shook his head. He would not look at her.

If they had never begun this, if Thomas hadn’t wanted it first, then James would not have come into their lives at all. Thomas would still be alive. Maybe it was a trade James would make.

“You know this isn’t what he would want.”

“Then go to the fucking country,” said James. “You’ve a talent for leaving.”

That took the wind out of her. Sometimes they could be as cruel as that to each other, and wish it unsaid after. But James’s eyes were closed, his face still and untroubled.

_I would not wish any companion in the world but you._

Unseeing, she put a hand on the side of the tub and levered herself to her feet. She could remember Thomas’s face, his dear face wet with tears, and he had made her promise. James would not say Thomas’s name but he would say this to her. _You’ve a talent for leaving._

Why should she care if James never forgave her? She hadn’t forgiven him, either. The only reason she had forgiven Thomas was that he was dead.


	16. Chapter 16

Miranda loses her virginity to one of her father’s parishioners, and her father knows nothing of it. They spend two months making happy assignations before the young man asks her to marry him.

“Oh,” says Miranda, “no. I—thank you, no. I don’t think I am very much suited to marriage.”

He requires some persuading that she is serious, and then more persuading before he will agree not to tell her father of their association. “It isn’t right,” he says, mulishly, over and over again.

Miranda puts her nose in the air. “I do not think it right to enter into a marriage in which there is no possibility of the kind of affection that a husband and wife owe to each other.”

The young man is injured by this, though Miranda intended to convey a lack on her own part: She likes people often—she likes this young man very much—but rarely does she admit them into the secret circle of her heart, and how can there be a marriage without that? It would only be the sort of joyless, rote thing that Thomas’s parents had had, or her own. She wants better for herself.

_Do you think that knowing you has unfit me for marriage?_ she writes to Thomas, teasing.

_It has certainly not unfit you to marry me,_ he writes back, _but you know your own mind best._

* * *

She meets the next young man—an officer in the Royal Navy by the graces of a wealthy godfather—while buying a goose for her mother’s table. Geoffrey Martin has long eyelashes and—she discovers at some length in the back room of a tavern—a mouth that is a gift from God. Though their tryst is heavenly while it lasts, it ends badly. Three days afterward, Miranda and her mother call upon Thomas, and she winces when he bows over her hand.

Thomas is startled. “I beg your pardon.”

Miranda’s mother shoots her a nasty glare. The rule is that she is not, ever, to do anything to damage her friendship with Lord Wallingford. Her sisters’ livelihoods may depend on it—she is told over and over. Mrs Castell makes a flimsy excuse to leave the room, upon which Thomas catches Miranda’s arm and rolls her sleeve back to find an angry purple bruise wrapping around her wrist, the marks of fingers clear.

“ _Miri,_ ” he says, appalled.

“It’s only sprained.” Miranda takes her wrist back. “It’s almost better.”

Thomas says, “I’m glad,” and carries on waiting.

After a long moment in which Miranda says nothing, Thomas sighs and settles himself on the carpet at the foot of her chair. His shoulder presses against the chair’s armrest, and one hand rests lightly on Miranda’s ankle.

Miranda touches Thomas’s shoulder, pushes in with her thumb so that he will feel the touch through his coat. He makes a small noise of contentment. Finally, she says, “He thought I did it to trap him into marriage. I told him that I did not want to marry him, but—”

She can feel the tension rise in Thomas, but he keeps waiting, inexorable.

“And he was angry,” Miranda says, “and— I don’t think he meant to hurt me, or not, not in particular. Only that—he was angry. There is a hope that he will marry his godfather’s second daughter, and he knew who my father is, and—” She begins to laugh, a high and hysterical noise that sounds nothing like her. What happened was not so very bad, and she knew the risks when she began. If she had screamed, someone would have come, and Geoffrey wanted that even less than she did. He only twisted her arm, and shouted at her, and frightened her.

Thomas tucks himself closer, his back a reassuring warmth against her legs. He reaches a hand up and laces long fingers through hers. “Can I do anything about it?” he says.

“No.” Miranda doesn’t know how to say what she wants to say, that it is a relief just to be with someone who doesn’t expect anything of her. Someone who adores her because of and not despite what she wants and who she is.

“Why should I,” she says, “resign myself to being fucked once a week for the next forty years by some—some shopkeeper, and probably die birthing fourteen fat dull babies for him, or else be consigned to prostitution and moral decay and whatever else my father thinks happens to women who let a man between their legs?”

Thomas tilts his head back and gives her his sweetest smile. “There is a third option.”

“That’s just the first one without the bloody screaming death,” says Miranda waspishly.

“Or the fucking,” Thomas points out. “And I should think even a woman as unconventional as you are would take some comfort at escaping a bloody screaming death.”

Miranda tries to press her lips tight, but the laugh burbles out of her anyway. She puts her free hand over her face. “You always make me laugh. It isn’t fair.”

“I don’t like to think—” Thomas shifts so that he can rest his cheek against Miranda’s leg. She spares a thought for what her mother would say, but she wants the comforting closeness of him. Thomas begins again. “You’re my dearest friend, and I cannot—I—to know that someone hurt you, when my name could have protected you. I hate it. I _hate_ it.”

“I don’t want to be protected.”

“I don’t want you to need to be,” says Thomas. “I want you to be safe, and well, and happy, and near me whenever you like to be; that’s all I want.” He sounds terribly sad. Miranda resents the world for being what it is. She knows herself for a sinner, but Thomas is good to his core, and he deserves—

She isn’t sure what he deserves, what she would choose for him. She knows she would give him something better than a life of secrets, shared with her only because they are neither of them free. Gently, she strokes his cheek with the back of her fingers. “I do love you,” she says. “It’s only that it wouldn’t be a proper marriage.”

“You mean,” says Thomas, bitter, “that I wouldn’t despise you, and I wouldn’t force myself on you, and you wouldn’t hate me for—” He shivers. “I’m sorry. I love you, too.”

After that, Thomas doesn’t bring it up again, but he doesn’t marry, either. His father does, hoping for a new heir. Thomas goes on a tour of the continent, and writes letters back to Miranda with badly-done sketches of the monuments he sees. The new Lady Ashbourne falls ill, and recovers; falls ill, and recovers. _Father says that he has the devil’s own luck with wives,_ Thomas writes. He scores out _and sons_ but Miranda reads it through the back of the paper.

At least if she were married to Thomas, there would never be a day again in which he did not know that he was loved. Maybe that is a small thing, set against what he would lose by having her to wife.

She expects to have plenty of time to think it over, but Thomas gets back from the continent and asks her to marry him again. To prove to herself that she is sure of her refusal, she fucks her father’s clerk, and he—racked with guilt—confesses everything.

* * *

“A married man,” her father spits at her.

She forgot the man was married. She does not want to be the instrument of a married woman’s unhappiness, when there is already so much unhappiness in a marriage. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“Did you not think of your sisters?” he demands. “Did you spare even a thought for their futures?”

No, she didn’t. She did not think of much. She wanted to be reminded of the things that would not be possible if she were an earl’s wife. “I’m sorry,” she says, again.

“But I see no repentance in your face.” Her father looks to the heavens. “What example of godliness have I not set for you, Miranda? What occasion of sin has offered itself?”

He sounds genuinely bewildered, and Miranda feels almost sorry for him. If Thomas were here, he could tell her father all about God and looking within oneself to find the way to live that would put one in the nearest harmony with one’s fellow humans. The thought is grimly amusing, and that is a mistake.

“Are you laughing at me, madam?”

“No,” Miranda says, “no—”

Her father takes her by the wrist, and it reminds her of Geoffrey, his face, what might have happened. Suddenly furious, she wrenches free. She is in her own house. She is in her own bloody parlour, and she can feel the rabbit-fast pulse of her heart in her chest, her neck, her stomach, her arms.

“Who do you think will have you now?” he shouts at her, meaning that Thomas will not.

She is not afraid. Not of her own father, not in her own house. She is not and she will not be. She smiles provokingly at him. “Oh,” she says, “I think there are a fair few men who would like to have me,” and her father hits her so hard that she staggers sideways, fetches up painfully against the door frame, and drops to her knees.

_No,_ she thinks. _No, I will not have this,_ but she has no way to refuse what is happening.

“Get out,” her father says, above her. “There is no place for a disobedient, whorish girl in the house of God.”

_You may find that position unsupported by your Bible,_ she wants to say. But she is too afraid to say it. She is sick with the knowledge of her cowardice. Her face hurts, her knees, her right shoulder. She would rather let her father’s idea of her carry the day, than risk more pain. Maybe he does not truly mean for her to go, but when she gets clumsily to her feet, when she stumbles past him, he does not stop her.

She is soaked to the skin by the time she reaches Thomas’s London house, and her shoes are destroyed. She was too afraid to hunt for her pattens or her cloak, and so she came away without them. The butler raises an eyebrow and declines to admit her.

If she could choose, she would choose to be imposing, imperious, impossible for him to dismiss. The best she can manage is the last one: She staggers halfway across the entrance and sinks down, so the door cannot be shut.

“See here,” says the butler, and reaches down a hand to grab her wrist. She does not intend to scream but she screams, and that is what brings Thomas downstairs, and that is how he finds her.

She may never quite forgive him for the soft shocked way he says her name. All their lives they have been equal—Thomas has never made her feel the difference in their stations—but now, bitterly, she sees herself through his eyes: a bedraggled and frightened girl with nowhere else to go. He barks some orders at his butler and then kneels down next to her and wraps something about her, heavenly-warm soft brown fur. His fingers hover near her face briefly but do not touch the place where she supposes there must be a bruise forming. “I’m having a room prepared for you,” he says. “You can stay as long as you want.”

“Your father,” says Miranda.

A shadow crosses Thomas’s face, but, “I’ll manage him,” he says.

Very tired, and sad, Miranda leans her head against Thomas. He puts his arms around her, and she can feel him relax. He takes comfort from touching her. It is one of the things about him that breaks her heart, and that tiny burst of pity is enough to make her say, “If you want to marry me, still, then I will.”

Thomas says, shakily, “Good,” and rests his forehead in the cradle of her shoulder.

Some time later, when she starts to feel him shivering in the cold of the front foyer, they get each other up. Thomas wraps the fur cloak more tightly around her, and takes her upstairs to a bedroom with a fire and a bath.

“Our life can be whatever we want it to be,” Thomas says. He kisses her forehead and leaves. Not until much later, her feet pressed up against a hot water bottle, luxuriant from her first hot bath and the softest bed that she has ever slept in, does Miranda think that it is rather a strange pledge to mark an engagement.

* * *

The next morning, her left eye is swollen to a squint, and that whole side of her face is tender to even a very light touch. The maid brings clean clothes for her—heaven knows where they came from—and calls her _miss._ If she were Thomas’s wife, her life would be like this all the time.

She intends to tell Thomas that she has changed her mind. As a compromise, she will accept a little money from him to set herself up in lodgings while she works out what to do next. “I think it will be for the best,” she says gently to the mirror.

But then when she gets downstairs for breakfast, Thomas says her name in that wondering way of his. He is so delighted to see her, and he holds her chair. She cannot quite bring herself to be the reason his face falls.

Then, too, as the days follow on each other, she finds that she likes seeing him. She likes waking up in the morning and knowing that her presence in the house will be a joy to another of its occupants. When she wants to be alone, she can be alone, which is an innovation of being rich that has never occurred to her, but that she cannot see how she ever lived without. For most of the day, she is alone—Thomas goes to his coffeehouses, or to drink with friends, and she lounges about the house as if it belongs to her. And in the evenings, he comes home and they eat together and talk, and he reads to her with his head in her lap, and pauses to smile up at her, or nuzzle into her hand like a puppy when she strokes his hair.

What a strange and comfortable life, she thinks. She thinks this was not a bad idea, this exile.

(None of her family write, or call upon her. Not her mother, even. She is surprised to find her father’s principles so firm, for he must suspect where she has gone and what she—what Thomas is planning. She is surprised he would rather cast her off than profit by her.)

The banns are read the first week, and the second, and then Alfred Hamilton arrives from the country.

* * *

Miranda knows that Thomas hates and fears his father, and craves his approval too—a messy knot of things to feel and want. She intends to be very gentle with him now that Lord Ashbourne is here. If, when, Thomas says that they must end their engagement, she is prepared meekly to accept it. Had that not been her own intention, anyway? She only gave in because she was frightened and cold, and after that only because the idea had pleased Thomas so.

_By this light, I take thee for pity,_ she thinks, and laughs at herself.

She expects their pleasant dinners _a deux_ to be ruined by the earl’s arrival, and they are, though not for the reason she expects. She expects Lord Ashbourne’s imprecations about her virtue, and his casual cruelty to the maids, whom he would as soon slap in the face as look at. But Thomas will give money to the maids after, to make amends, and Miranda is not, indeed, coming a virgin to this betrothal. Even she knows to expect what the earl is like with Thomas, the way he looks Thomas in the eye and tells Miranda _I regret ever having sired such a son,_ and adds, _supposing his mother was even honest._

It’s Thomas she finds impossible to bear. He will defend the maids, and defend Miranda. For himself he holds silent; his lips tighten and his eyes go distant, and he says nothing.

_Coward,_ thinks Miranda.

She doesn’t know why it should grate on her. Thomas has lived with his father all his life. Surely he knows best how to manage. It’s between Thomas and his father, nothing to do with her.

She knows, too, that Lord Ashbourne is the one who deserves her anger. But when he says the things he says, and when Thomas looks the way he looks, it’s Thomas she resents. She closes her hands into fists, so tight that her fingernails cut into her palms. _Make him stop,_ she thinks at Thomas. _This is your own house. Make him damned well stop._

She intends to be so gentle with Thomas, while his father is there, but she can barely manage civility. “Why do you let your father speak to you like that?” she asks him, one evening, long after Lord Ashbourne has gone to bed. “Why do you not— When he calls me whore, you’re quick enough to chastise him for it.”

Thomas looks up from his book. “Mary would be happy to bring dinner to your rooms.”

“I did not ask if Mary would be happy to bring dinner to my rooms.”

“So you didn’t.”

“I asked why you let him speak to you like that.”

Thomas’s face hardens into the same attitude of harmless amiability that maddens Miranda when he presents it to his father. Mildly, he says, “I don’t know why.”

A few times over the years, she has been unkind, in her letters, made some slighting remark that stepped beyond their usual spirited disagreements. Thomas does not answer contempt with contempt—he _never_ has—only falls silent until she writes again in a better grace. She knows that his refusal to answer arises from some childish wish for invisibility in the face of wrath. He does not think himself so far above her that her anger is irrelevant to him. On a good day, she knows all of this.

With effort, she bites back an insult. “Don’t treat me like I’m somebody else,” she says instead, sharply.

The only sound, for a long while, is the crackling of the fire. Thomas’s eyes are on his book, but she doesn’t think he’s reading it. “My mother was honest.”

“What?”

“My mother was honest,” says Thomas, louder.

“I know she was.” How could she not know? Thomas wrote her about every pregnancy, every loss, his mother’s wavering faith in God.

“Father said she must be talking with other men, or else why would she be barren? He would send men away—footmen, mostly, a groom once.” Thomas slides a finger along the edge of his desk. “He got a child on Mother’s maid, when I was six. I wasn’t supposed to know anything about it, but my nurse told me. They brought a man to the house about her, and I never saw her again after that. I thought for years that Father had killed her.”

Miranda does not remind him that she already knew some of this, the footmen, the maid. “And so?”

“He did something to the baby,” says Thomas, his eyes fixed still on his book. “I don’t know how. He made it so the baby would not be born. My mother knew, and did nothing. When I was fifteen, I remembered it had happened and asked her. She said she thought it unlikely the child would have survived anyway, and it was quicker to let my father have his own way.”

For the first time since she came into Thomas’s house, the thought of marrying him sends a chill of fear through Miranda’s spine. She has not considered that the protection of an earl’s son—which she doesn’t want in any case—might not extend to the earl himself.

Thomas says, “I choose what battles to fight with him, as she did. I hope that I choose better.”

It is the nearest Miranda has ever heard him come to criticizing his mother. She goes to him and puts her hands on his shoulders, and he leans his cheek against her arm, presses a kiss to the inside of her wrist. She does not want to be a thing for which Thomas does battle. If they had not been friends for so long, she thinks, and if consequently she had not learned to love him so much, this would all be very much easier to stomach.

“Do you think that you still—with other men?” she asks.

“Yes,” says Thomas, his ears turning pink. “I—yes. But—”

Miranda interrupts him. “Your father will have reason to call me dishonest, then. The same as your mother, and for the same reason.”

Thomas twists his neck to look up at her.

“Although in my case, he will be correct.”

“No,” says Thomas. He takes one of her hands and tugs on it, bringing her to stand in front of him.

“I don’t mean—” Miranda is embarrassed, and angry, and angry for being embarrassed. “I don’t mean I’ll cuckold you _now,_ I meant he would be right about—what has happened, in the past. That I’m not—a maiden.”

“No,” Thomas says, again, stubbornly. “I am not marrying you to keep you from—it isn’t cuckolding me if our marriage isn’t the sort that admits of cuckolding.” His eyes search her face. “I told you, it’s our own decision, nobody else’s. And I’ll die before I let anyone hurt you again.”

It is a young man’s declaration, but Thomas is very young. The two years’ difference between them might as well be ten. “And I you,” she says.

Though—

In the event she did not die, to save him from pain. She lived, and Thomas—

And Thomas—

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals significantly with the aftermath of suicide and the emotional state of two survivors of suicide (Miranda and James)—although of course, Thomas isn’t dead, and they’ll find that out later in the fic. In particular, chapter 4 includes a flashback scene where Miranda finds out that Thomas died by suicide, and she completely dissociates. Later she contemplates the contemporary societal/religious view of suicide, including some very very harsh Christian rhetoric around suicide and unbaptized/"sinful" people generally.
> 
> As a child, Miranda conceptualizes Africa and southern Asia (i.e., places that have rhinoceroses) as being outside of civilization; this happens at the very start of chapter 7.
> 
> There's also some discussion of inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, when Miranda imagines Thomas's life in Bethlem. This is a theme that will recur in the fic series! It's never portrayed on-page, but the characters think about and are affected by real and imagined institutional violence in Bedlam, including inadequate food, physical violence, failure to provide medical care, leeching, purging, and forced cold bathing. None of this is discussed at great length, and I’ll provide more specific warnings as these themes arise in later chapters.
> 
> Miranda thinks about violence and suicide in the context of a mental institution. In chapter 24, she briefly contemplates self-harm.
> 
> James is coping with internalized and external homophobia as part of his plan with Peter Ashe.
> 
> In flashbacks, Miranda experiences sexist violence: A man she's sleeping with sprains her wrist (not on page, but it's discussed), and her father (on page) hits her and throws her out of the house because he finds out she's had sex with a man.
> 
> We see white, English characters thinking and talking about English relations with Native American nations, and in chapter 17, Peter Ashe uses a slur ("savages") to refer to Native Americans. Later, a Creek woman discusses some of the ways in which the English colonizers obstruct and harm Native people.
> 
> In chapter 30, a character talks about losing a child; later in the section it's mentioned that the same character has had another baby but has given it up for adoption because the child is illegitimate.


End file.
